You should have a stable server that almost never reboots (this will cause active downloads to stop, giving broken downloads to the users)
With a good bandwidth (recommended at least 1TB / monthly so we don't want you to be overbilled)
At least 20GB+ of disk space to store them
An own user for the mirror with ssh access (isos are sent using ssh+rsync to them)
To NOT use: cloudflare (or similar)
Bandwith usage details
In an average good usage, there are around 30 downloads per day between all the mirrors, if we have 6 mirrors this means 4.4 downloads, the isos average size is 3.3 GB
Result: (3.3 x 4.4 x 30) means usage of 400 GB per month
Most hostings should provide at least 1 or 2 TB of bandwidth for their cheapest options (vultr = 2TB for 5 usd/month), which should suffice for the need
Don't use a server which reboots from time to time (downloads to the user will be corrupted if they are downloading)
Auto method (nginx only):
We have a special tool to Elivize servers (adding elive features), one of these options is to install an Elive mirror (using nginx) everything in an automated way, if you want to use this tool you can read more about it to know how it works or just run the command:
Important: we don't recommend using this method if you use Apache, so it will install nginx
Manual method:
Create a user where the isos will be stored and the web link pointed to
Create a subdomain to serve the isos, or just a web link, it will require to have autorenewable SSL certificate (httpS), that point to the location of the isos
Using Apache: mod_rewrite (AllowOverride All) should be enabled, or using Nginx: "autoindex on" should be enabled
One-shot script to run from the user:
HOSTNAME=\$(hostname) ; yes | ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "\$HOSTNAME" -f "\$HOME/.ssh/id_rsa" -P ""
mkdir -p "$HOME/.ssh"
echo 'ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEAk45j0yfCnHcyi6EKy/tnUOfUKMMeVf1rc/nRPratslLwVVr+bCqjS/KVc5si+8yGsCxQzow2TC3hlymvyxVZhA0Q17G87UQb61nLeG9sl45LyPg5gqLYZUoxaxjT/L/T5XkqpfXhXle5ix0metdSh0sZHMnfhRvMXOAkQHY7YBWMkh9TOLu45GiUW2XKDSZjEWV0NeR06r66KspqsV5jR6HCZ9iQDMoya/6HdTqNDqpza+qqAcHvXCWAbAgr95PXDbSM1KIS9KCRebHVka1437kCU3vrwXKBIb0OF0Rnseqs4icTu2xnu74H2/+uM/C+o4f2QFjJM/CwlQ0w2kL2+Q== elivewebsites@zatara' >> "$HOME/.ssh/authorized_keys"
chmod 744 "$HOME/.ssh"
chmod 600 "$HOME/.ssh/authorized_keys"
mkdir -p "$HOME/public_html"
chgrp -R "www-data" "$HOME/public_html" # debian and similar systems uses www-data user for the webserver, make sure that this user is set to the group of the directory recursively
chmod -R 750 "$HOME/public_html"
chmod g+s "$HOME/public_html"
Finally, send an email to Thanatermesis 4t gmail with: The web link for the isos, the username and the directory on which is located the isos (~/public_html/ probably), the city/country where is located the mirror, your email in case a contact is needed.
This howto has been recovered from dev.elivecd.org (which is actually broken due to an ubuntu upgrade on the shared server) thanks to a snapshot in archive.org
I'm renewing my home server and i was wondering, would be a raspberry pi 3 based server be enough powerful for this task? I should be able to grant a 98% uptime due to multiple fault tolerance solutions and a 100Mbit/s stable connection with no data limits (I'm looking forward to upgrade it to 1Gbit/s as soon as possible). The raspberry choice is due to energy cost mainly.
I think it should work. I contemplated the same for my my home server but don't really have enough upload bandwidth.
The download is 100-200 Mb/s but up is only 10-20 Mb. This 10% ratio is fairly normal except if you take a business connection ..... are you sure about your ratios?
Yeah you're right i forgot about the 10% ratio. damn. Well as said hopefully will get the gigabit connection soon! It is said it will be(virtually) 200 Mbit in upload
edit: @triantares so looks like we're making a better server at a friend's house. it should be supposedly based on on a 2011 4 core Xeon (forgive me i don't remember the actual name rn) and windows server on top of it (forgive me @Thanatermesis but if we do not try it for free as long as we are students idk when we will!). Gigabit connection with 110 Mbit/s for upload. Is it good enough now?
10-20 Mb upload sounds good except for the moments of release (which you can have 20 downloads simultaneously), apart of that, the biggest important thing is the stability of the server (no reboots, no restarts of the web server, etc...) because on such case, the dowlnoads of the users on -that- moment will be cut leading to broken isos (and so, "oh elive don't boots! crappy distro not even able to boot on my computer")
the biggest fault of this is of course by chrome, firefox, and almost every browsers, which doesn't offer a reliable download system (if the download fails,doesn't continue, and the user don't even know about it)
I can guarantee a stable server, on 24/7. Apart from unexpected hardware faults ofc. But as said before, i'm looking forward for getting Gbit connection so even the speed bottleneck would be avoided (10Mbit/s would mean about 45/55 mins to download elive. Which is too much.)
IMHO actually zsync is just a tip / trick for us to download using less bandwith, remember that it also requires a previous version of elive so basically is useful for us (active betatesters), so we can use the default one (removing the S from httpS links) or using the other version at our own
yeah hardware faults is another story sounds good then!
I have been looking into AWS options but DANG ! they make it hard too see where "free of charge" ends and bills start coming.
I was actually hoping @yoda would look into it (it's his speciality I sumrise) and create a HOWTO. I mean if there's 5 or 6 of those AWS instances out there we could do something.
Me, I started checking the "free tier" options out and got lost along the way.
I would like to know how many download of the ISO and/or how many Gigs / month actual downloads are taking.
Please get back to me @Thanatermesis
Even if I disagree with all of you on the actual download method, I am still open to help
So my question : How many Gigs or Download/month approx do you currently have
Actual download speed is another pain for new user and I want to solve it.
@Thanatermesis if I pay for some powefull VM on "MY" Cloud provider, Could i have my company Logo/link somewhere on your site and be listed as some " corporate sponsor" ?
What is about the torrent idea -
to keep e.g. Transmission open as we are online anyway
and share the already downloaded version that everyone of us will have handy ....
We had torrent well establish when 64 came out I think...
We we just have to follow @Thanatermesis and do what we have to do / follow his instruction on how to set it back up again the right way so we can seed all day long
I do not have internet limit and have a fast link so I am ok with setting my station up again for that..
Same here but there will be some issues to solve first in respect to amd64 as torrents are freely accessible.
sorry for all typos. Am posting from my phone (using Opera)
I would strongly suggest that the mirror should be "unlimited bandwith", otherwise overbill can happen (and those hostings with a limited bandwith seems to be low for the mirror needs, think about 1k downloads can happen easily in a week on releases, so 4TB / week)
Also, the server should be set with apache (those "places" services to store data as objects like AWS is a very strange thing that wont' work), and a remote ssh with rsync installed is needed too
in the website? yes, i can create a page for that (so we don't have any yet)
only for stable releases, no time to maintain that too much human work
I'm happy to announce a new mirror from France, the owner of the mirror is Remi and is a big fan of Elive since the start, a very stable server with more than 500 days of uptime and 100Mbit bandwith
With it, we have now a mirror in France and another in China that has been recently added too 1(very good locations), where before we had only 1-2 mirrors around!
Tho... you could update the torrent just sometimes. I keep reinstalling the same old beta version since it uploads anyway by itself!
Btw, what about, instead of calling it elive beta, you do not call it elive rolling? I mean: it works, it updates costantly, always on the edge... it's a rolling version!
that's what I do, but with important releases only
yuck don't do that, better to use an updated version
yes and no, some things are not included in the iso (sometimes a new version of elive-tool is required or other elements, the selection of packages included are different, same for kernels and drivers, etc...)
yes its pretty rolling, but in any case we need the announcements in order to get some promotion... when there's no releases announced for 1 month, the downloads decreases a lot, people "forgets" that elive exists lol (or more exactly, people don't know about it, it doesn't appears on any website, and it appears in a very few btw)
you have a server or a personal computer that you want to use as server?
There's long time i was thinking into make a kind of "version" of elive for servers (version without graphical system, heh!)
hum, normally webhosts includes a panel where to create the domains and things like that, otherwise you must follow some howtos
sounds good then! 
(those "places" services to store data as objects like AWS is a very strange thing that wont' work), and a remote ssh with rsync installed is needed too
