ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

A Call for some Hard Core Mirrors —

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

As I was collecting textfiles and other artifacts from the BBS era and beyond, I started to go after the logical next step: audio recordings and “art scene” creations. In the case of audio, it started with conferences from the 1990s and voicemail recordings, but it has quickly expanded into the current hacker radio shows and other collections that people have brought to me.

In the “artscene” section, I knew it was going to be large, since I would be collecting works from ANSI Art Packs, MOD and Music writers, and a whole host of other demos, drawings and works going back for a very long time. Indeed, the collection is already in the tens of gigabytes.

In both cases, the sites have gained in popularity, until the day has finally come that they are starting to hurt my bandwidth. This is bandwidth that comes out of my own pocket, with no advertising or other stupidities to augment them. I am fine with this, but people who use the sites are starting to notice the slowdown.

So, I would like to ask if anyone is interested in being a mirror for these sites. They are very large, and very popular with folks, and I don’t see the popularity coming down. I do not want mirrors who will add advertising to them, although the mirror link themselves will tell you who is providing it, and there can be a “information about this mirror” page that will be a “anything you want” sort of situation.

To save people some back and forth, I have to say that you have to be running your own server and have a lot of pipe to really be a mirror in this case; people often offer me space out of the goodness of their hearts, and I appreciate it, but this stuff will get you kicked off a shared server faster than you can imagine.

If you know someone with a lot of space and a need to flex their muscles, please contact me: mirrorhelp@textfiles.com. Thanks.


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  1. Two suggestions: FreeCache and BitTorrent. FreeCache is pretty easy to impliment, just add http://freecache.org/ before any URL and it will cache and mirror files between 5 and 1000 megs.