Introduction

As a service primarily aimed at our customers, we provide local mirrors for most of the distributions used within our hosting environment.

Use of the mirror server does not contribute towards your monthly bandwidth allowance, thus it allows you to save time and money but not compromise on keeping your system up-to-date. If there is a public archive which you make frequent use of which you’d like to see mirrored, please contact us and we’ll try to find space to mirror it.

For the full, up-to-date list of what is on offer head over to the server itself. The mirror is available on both IPv4 and IPv6.

• Blastwave (www.blastwave.org)
• CentOS (www.centos.org)
• CFengine (www.cfengine.org)
• CPAN (www.cpan.org)
• Debian GNU/Linux (www.debian.org)
• Debian GNU/Linux Backports (www.backports.org)
• Debian GNU/Linux Volatile Packages (www.debian.org/volatile)
• Dotdeb (www.dotdeb.org)
• Fedora Linux (www.fedora.org) (including EPEL)
• FreeBSD (www.freebsd.org)
• Gentoo Linux — distfiles & portage tree (www.gentoo.org)
• MySQL (www.mysql.com)
• OpenBSD (www.openbsd.org)
• Slackware Linux (www.slackware.org)
• Sun Freeware (www.sunfreeware.com)
• Parallels Plesk (www.plesk.com)
• Ubuntu Linux — archive (www.ubuntu.com)
• Ubuntu Linux — CD and DVD releases (releases.ubuntu.com)

The debian-backports, debian, ubuntu and ubuntu-releases mirrors are updated on a push basis, i.e. an upstream mirror notifies our mirror when an update is due. All other mirrors are updated every 4 hours, apart from

• gentoo-portage — 30 minutes
• blastwave, debian-dotdeb — 8 hours
• cfengine, mysql, swsoft-plesk — 12 hours

All mirrors are complete for all architectures.

Using the mirrors with your machine

Here are some instructions on how to use our mirrors with the various distributions.

Debian GNU/Linux

Add or replace the deb lines in /etc/apt/sources.list with the following:

# /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/debian lenny main contrib non-free
deb-src http://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/debian lenny main contrib non-free 

Debian Backports

Official repositories of Debian have a reputation for being rock solid and stable, but missing out on some newer software. backports.org is a very useful site containing backports of some newer software to Debian:

# /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian-backports.list
deb http://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/debian-backports lenny-backports main
deb-src http://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/debian-backports lenny-backports main

Debian Volatile

This repository tracks regularly updating packages such as anti-virus definitions and spam-filtering rules, that would not make it into the normal stable repositories.

# /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian-volatile.list
deb http://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/debian-volatile  lenny/volatile main contrib non-free
deb-src http://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/debian-volatile  lenny/volatile main contrib non-free

Ubuntu

Ubuntu have a regular release schedule, so you should replace “lucid” in the examples below with the release of Ubuntu that your machine is using.

# /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/ubuntu lucid main restricted
deb-src http://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/ubuntu lucid main restricted

This is a full mirror, and carries the backports, updates and proposed packages for all available distributions of Ubuntu. The universe and multiverse components are also available.

We also mirror Ubuntu releases for CD and DVD image downloads.

CentOS

Add this file into the directory /etc/yum.repos.d to use our CentOS mirror.

Fedora

Add this file into the directory /etc/yum.repos.d to get your machine using our mirrors.

Gentoo

Ensure the following lines are present in your /etc/make.conf

GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/gentoo"
SYNC="rsync://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/gentoo-portage"

Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN)

CPAN is the canonical source of code for your Perl applications. To use our mirror, Start `cpan` and then issue the commands:

o conf urllist unshift http://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/cpan/
o conf commit

Then to check you’re using our mirror:

reload index