Hosting mirrors for Open Source software

(note: this post is antedated to form a proper timeline of the developments of my network, it was actually written in march of 2024)

A network is no fun without traffic, right? It’s like the blood flowing through the veins. Although its more like the flashes of light blinking through the fibers.

I already run some Tor relays, but I wanted to see if I could do more. And hosting a mirror is one of the things I came up with. It can help the open-source community while providing users of the mirror with a fast way to grab the packeges or ISOs they need.

With some spare storage and writing a short script for syncing the mirror, I was off to the races! I decided to start with Arch Linux. The repo is relatively small and the process of becoming a mirror was written well and clear.

When hosting a mirror, you want to make sure yours stays in sync with the master source. You want to sync ofter and you want something to alert you when the syncing fails for some reason. I setup healthchecks.io since it’s flexible, free and easy to setup.

I announced my mirror on the Arch Linux Gitlab and I was promply added as an official mirror. Which meant I soon got traffic from actual Arch users to download packages. The mirror is also listed on the Arch Linux website

With some spare disk space, I decided I could add some more. I looked for projects I could host, accounting for things like available disk space, amount of mirrors at locations nearby and groundrules set by the project maintainers.

I am now hosting mirrors for the following projects:

• Arch Linux
• Manjaro Linux
• MariaDB
• Tails
• Tor
• Termux

You can check out the sync status and traffic graphs of the mirror at mirror.bouwhuis.network/mirrorstats