Why no FreeBSD ftp site in India?

[Willie Viljoen]

> The Universities/Institutes which can provide bandwidth for this
> purpose are IIT's and IISc. IISc is hosting sunsite and also has the
> debian mirror. AFAIK, no one has FreeBSD mirror.
>
> the only Indian site regading BSD I know is www.bsd-india.org
>
> Shantanoo

Sadly, it is up to an institution hoping to host a mirror site to come
forward and offer the space and bandwidth. The FreeBSD developers can't
really go around asking people to host several gigabytes and dedicate big
bandwidth, they would just think they are rude :)

If you can convince someone from an IT department at your local university
to get space and bandwidth, they should get in touch with the FreeBSD
project, they should be able to find the addresses they need at
http://www.FreeBSD.org/

Here in South Africa, we do not have many university IT departments that are
seriously interested in any open source software. The only universities that
provide large mirrors with lots of software are those operated by the Rhodes
University Computer User Society, and by the University of Stellenbosch.
These are limited though, they only carry some versions, and as far as I
remember, Stellenbosch do not mirror ISO images.

We are lucky however, to have a big ISP that seem to be committed to helping
the cause. Internet Solution provide a full FreeBSD mirror including the
latest ISOs. They also mirror most other popular open source software. Most
people seem to think this was made possible because of IS's employees
internally deciding to provide the mirrors, out of good will. Others
speculate that it was to counter the incredible bandwidth usage caused by
downloading ISOs, South Africa still has very slow international lines, so
our ISPs mirror a lot of larger sites to try and keep international traffic
within acceptable levels.

For that kind of situation to occur though, you would either need an insider
at a big ISP, or enough users to drive the ISPs up the wall with legitimate
international bandwidth requirements that exceed what they can provide. Most
ISPs in developing countries (I use those here in SA as an example) will go
to absolutely any length to avoid having to buy bigger lines, especially
international lines.

Will