This site contains older material on Eiffel. For the main Eiffel page, see http://www.eiffel.com.

Mirroring the eiffel.com site

Thank you for your interest in mirroring the eiffel.com site. The following describes the simple procedure to follow

Useful address

If you are interested in mirroring our site and have any questions after reading this note, please contact us at mirrors@eiffel.com.

Requirements for mirror sites

We welcome mirror sites as they help everyone. The requirements are the following:

You must have at least 400 MB available. (The current site contains only about 300 MB, but there should be some room for growth.)

We should know the name and e-mail of a person to be contacted in case a problem should arise.

You must agree to remove or update material if we ask you to (this process is best done automatically -- see next), and to notify us if you stop mirroring, so that we can remove any obsolete links.

The best way to maintain the mirror site on Unix is to use the publicly available mirror program. This will automatically ensure that your site carries a faithful image of ours, updated incrementally whenever we change something. If your site does not already have mirror, you can download it as per the instructions given below.

What to mirror

The directory to mirror is

ftp://ftp.eiffel.com/pub/download

We have put in it only what should be mirrored, and will continue to manage it so that it contains only the "mirrorable" stuff.

How to proceed

1 - Choose an address and a directory. The path name should end with `download' for consistency. Obviously, the directory should at all times contain nothing else than the copy of our stuff.

2 - Copy the files from the above eiffel.com address, probably using mirror.

3 - Set up mirror to run regularly for updates. We suggest an update frequency of one day to be able to keep up with changes in the download area. The changes are, however, usually small, so the size of data transferred is small.

4 - Send to mirrors@eiffel.com a note indicating the address. (Please do this only when the files have only been copied as per step 2, so that we can immediately add the proper link to the Web pages.)

How to get the mirror program

(These instructions may be superseded by more recent evolutions.) You can get mirror from any of the following:

The latest version of mirror is available from:

        src.doc.ic.ac.uk [146.169.2.1]
                directory: computing/archiving/mirror
                (shortcut packages/mirror)

        ftp.th-darmstadt.de [130.83.55.75]
                directory: pub/networking/mirror


        ftp.sun.ac.za [146.232.213.2]
                directory: pub/packages/mirror

        archive.orst.edu [128.193.4.2]
                directory: pub/mirrors/src.doc.ic.ac.uk/computing/archiving/mirr
or
                (shortcut pub/packages/mirror)

Mirror program documentation

This is just a copy of a manual page, and may again be superseded by more recent versions.

MIRROR(1L)                                             MIRROR(1L)


NAME
       mirror - mirror packages on remote sites

SYNOPSIS
       mirror [flags] -gsite:pathname
       mirror [flags] [config-files]

DESCRIPTION
       Mirror is a package written in Perl that uses the ftp pro-
       tocol to  duplicate  a  directory  hierarchy  between  the
       machine it is run on and a remote host.  It avoids copying
       files unnecessarily by comparing the file time-stamps  and
       sizes  before  transferring.  Amongst other things, it can
       optionally compress, gzip, and split files.

       It was written for use by archive maintainers but  can  be
       used by anyone wanting to transfer a lot of files via ftp.

       Regardless of how it is called, mirror always performs the
       same  basic steps.  It connects to the remote site, inter-
       nally builds a  directory  listing  of  the  local  target
       directory,  builds  one for the remote directory, compares
       them, creates any subdirectories required,  transfers  the
       appropriate  files  (setting  their  time-stamps  to match
       those on the remote site),  creates  any  symbolic  links,
       removes any unnecessary objects and finally drops the con-
       nection.

       Mirror can handle symbolic links but not  ordinary  links.
       It  does not duplicate owner or group information.  If you
       require any of these options, use rdist(1) instead.

       Mirror is called in one of two ways shown in the  synopsis
       above.

       The  first  method  is used to retrieve a remote directory
       into the current directory.  If you are mirroring a direc-
       tory,  it  would  be  best  to end the pathname in a slash
       ('/') so the remote recursive listing is  smaller  or  use
       the  -r  flag  to  suppress recursion (see -g below).  The
       mirror.defaults file is not used.

       In the second method given in the synopsis above, a  mini-
       mal  number  of  arguments are required and mirror is con-
       trolled by the settings read from the configuration  files
       (or  standard input).  If a file named mirror.defaults can
       be found in either the directory the mirror executable  is
       in  or  in the PERLLIB path, then it is loaded first. This
       is used to provide common defaults for all config-files.