Why we mirror sunsite and tsx-11

People sometimes ask why a user group bothered to run an FTP site at all. The answer is bandwidth, or the lack of it. In the late 1990s, pulling a distribution or a pile of packages across the Atlantic was slow and flaky. A local mirror meant the bits were a short, fast hop away.

What lived here

This server carried daily mirrors of key parts of sunsite at UNC and tsx-11 at MIT, plus packages from smaller sites that were otherwise hard to find. It also became a home for software that originated locally. If you wrote something useful and needed a place to distribute it, the webmaster would try to help.

The archives

Alongside the files we kept browsable hypermail archives of the linux-kernel, linux-net, linux-msdos and mtools mailing lists, so you could search the real conversations in a browser. You can read about all of it on the Mirrors & Archives page.