Fun with Bandwidth Costs

As most of you know, the recent review on OSNews has brought a large influx of users to us. While we're overjoyed to have so many new users, the bandwidth costs associated with all these new --sysupgrade'ers is going to cost me a lot of money that I don't really have.

To curb the trend, I've had to cap transfer speeds on ftp.archlinux.org. They now sit at 20 K/s with a max of 30 users at a time.

So, long story short, I have a couple of favors to ask:

  1. If you can volunteer to be a mirror, please contact me.
  2. Please download this perl script, which will use the "netselect" program to re-sort the server lists in pacman.conf, lowest ping times first. You can run it like so:
    # ./sortmirrors.pl </etc/pacman.conf >pacman.conf.new
    Make sure pacman.conf.new looks okay, then move it into place:
    # mv pacman.conf.new /etc/pacman.conf
  3. If you can spare a few bucks for a bandwidth-hungry distribution, please donate. We're looking to get another server, but the donations just aren't there yet.

Thanks a lot everyone. We'll keep on making it if you keep on running it.