[ILUG] ftp.heanet.ie upgraded

[Colm MacCarthaigh]

Following three years of service, ftp.heanet.ie has recently been
upgraded to a major new setup. As ever, details of the setup, and
current information on the status of ftp.heanet.ie are available at;

	http://ftp.heanet.ie/about/
	http://ftp.heanet.ie/status/

ftp.heanet.ie now comprises over 12 Terabytes of storage, 32 Gigabytes of RAM
and a new 136 Gigabyte RAID-0 caching layer for popular content. We hope that
this level of storage will unperin an effective service, meeting current and
future requirements.

ftp.heanet.ie's network connectivity has also been significantly upgraded
and there are changes which may of interest;

	ftp.heanet.ie serves content over FTP, HTTP and RSYNC and is 
	available over IPv4 and IPv6. Clients should correctly resolve the IP 
	version supported; however, the ftp.ipv4.heanet.ie and 
	ftp.ipv6.heanet.ie records facilitate manual specification of the IP 
	version to be used.

	For some time now ftp.heanet.ie has tagged all outgoing traffic with 
	a differential services code-point (DSCP) IP header value of 0x08 
	which is the conventional value assigned to "Less than Best Effort" 
	(LBE). This means that even with a minimal IP Quality of Service (QoS)
	configuration on your network it is possible to de-prioritise traffic 
	from ftp.heanet.ie. This also enables HEAnet and GÉANT to ensure that 
	ftp.heanet.ie traffic does not contend with customer traffic. 

	ftp.heanet.ie now supports Jumboframes of up to 9000 bytes in size
	Traditionally ethernet and general internal traffic is restricted to 
	sending frames of 1500 bytes in size. A file 1 Megabyte in size took 
	about 750 sent packets to download. With Jumboframes, this can now 
	be achieved in fewer than 120 packets. This can represent a major 
	speed increase, and we've been able to download entire DVD ISO's in 
	9 seconds in testing with jumboframes enabled. HEAnet currently
	extends jumboframe connectivity to the GEANT network.

	ftp.heanet.ie now sports 4 Gigabit/sec of load-balanced out-bound 
	connectivity, and 2 Gigabit/sec of resilient in-bound connectivity. 
	This connectivity is in place in order to cope with future peak 
	demands and is not intended for immediate use, so rate-limits at 1.5 
	Gigabit/sec are currently in-place. Further to this, we are committed 
	to ensuring no contention with other general internet or customer
	traffic through the use of QoS configurations.

We have also taken the opportunity of the migration to revise and renew the
content of the mirror. Over three years of usage, some files have become
corrupted due to local and remote problems. We rely on user reports of such
errors and always try to rectify them as quickly on possible, however now we
are in a position to do more;

	We have re-synced from scratch many of our popular items. For
	example, we have re-synced the entire RedHat tree (some 256Gb
	of content) and manually verified its contents. We have also
	checked some 50,000 Debian packages and re-synced approximately
	100 from our Debian archive.

	We now have the CPU and spare I/O capacity to start automated 
	checksum verification for as much of our content as we are
	in a position to verify, and are putting this system in place.

Also related to this migration, we hope to re-commission Canyonero.heanet.ie as
a FreeBSD-running CVS-up capable mirror server, to enable an oft-requested
CVSup service. 

As ever, if you have any questions, comments or suggestions (including content
you would like to see mirrored), feel free to mail mirrors at heanet.ie.

-- 
Colm MacCárthaigh  /   HEAnet, Teach Brooklawn,  /   Innealtóir Líonra
+353 1 6609040    /  Bóthar Shelbourne, BÁC, IE /  http://www.hea.net/