The Free Software Mirror Group

C1 | Mon 21 Jan | 12:05 p.m.–12:20 p.m.

Presented by

  • Brad Cowie
    @nzgizmoguy

    Brad is a member of the WAND Network Research Group at the University of Waikato. He is also a core member of the FAUCET project which develops an open source OpenFlow controller for enterprise networks. Utilising his years of experience deploying servers and networks he deploys FAUCET around the world doing SDN deployments with FAUCET.

  • James Forman
    https://jamesforman.co.nz

    James is a Linux Sysadmin at Catalyst IT in Wellington where he works on building things that can survive earthquakes. He has obsessions with monitoring, automation, backups and making sure people don’t get woken up. James is a maintainer of New Zealand’s Free Software Mirror Group.

Abstract

A lot of the newer free software projects use either cloud providers or a small set of mirrors located in Europe or the USA to provide access to their software and packages. New Zealand has a unique situation where we have ubiquitous access to fast fibre in urban centres and high latency low bandwidth to International destinations. In order to improve access to popular and new free software projects a number of local sysadmins from different companies formed “The Free Software Mirror Group” (FSMG). We will take this opportunity to introduce the community to FSMG and propose the ways we want to help the community in future. This talk will cover what happened in FSMG’s first year of operation, from how we started the project to how we operate the project day to day. FSMG are currently official mirrors in New Zealand for Debian, Kali, Raspbian, CentOS, Arch Linux, OpenBSD and other projects. Linux Australia: http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2019/c1/Monday/The_Free_Software_Mirror_Group.webm YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Umt8L1qimCs