About AARNet's Mirror
AARNet's mirror archive was established as a pilot project in 1998 as
as a recommendation for a Large Object Cache from the AARNet2 Caching
and Mirroring working group.
It aims to provide cost savings on international traffic and improved
performance to frequently accessed archives to AARNet's members.
The initial deployment was a 4 processor Sun SCS1000 with 256M of ram
and 50G of disk, based at the University of Queensland within the
Questnet regional network.
Over two years, the server was upgraded to 1G of ram (via
a donation) and approximately 500 Gigabytes of disk space from UQ
and AARNet. This was reaching the limits of the base hardware and
a decision was made to upgrade the system.
In 2001, Sun Microsystems donated a new Sun Enterprise 450 and
AARNet purchased two A1000 disk systems for the mirror. It was
physically located at the AARNet Point of Presence (PoP)
at the ACT Regional Network Organisation (ACTRNO), The Australian
National University in Canberra.
In 2006, a significantly upgraded hardware solution was deployed with a
dedicated connection to the AARNet3 backbone. Additional disk space provided
a larger software archive coverage that has been populated with up to date
software and archive distributions.
Requests to archive or point to suitable objects, questions or
suggestions can be made to the mirror management team at:
The mirror now provides a large coverage of OpenSource, and academically related archives to AARNet members, including
UNIX sources and applications, Linux, PC and Macintosh software and internet documents such as RFCs and FAQs.
We hope you will assist AARNet in realising the potential benefits
of this service. We would be pleased to receive any suggestions
about content, performance, experiences or issues that will assist
in the development of this service.