This machine was not just a set of web pages. It was a working mirror and archive for the Linux community: daily mirrors of key FTP sites, browsable HTML archives of the busy Linux mailing lists, and a distribution point for packages that originated here. This page describes what lived on the server.
Mailing lists in HTML
Long before the web swallowed everything, the real conversation happened on mailing lists. This server kept hypermail archives so you could read and search them in a browser:
- linux-kernel - the firehose where the kernel was actually built, archived by week.
- linux-net - networking, from early TCP/IP stacks to PPP and beyond.
- linux-msdos - running DOS programs and sharing DOS disks under Linux.
- mtools - Alain Knaff's toolkit for reading and writing MS-DOS floppies, and its own busy list.
The archives ran to many thousands of messages. In this restored edition the index pages are kept as a historical record; the individual third-party messages are not republished in full.
FTP mirrors
The anonymous FTP area carried daily mirrors of key parts of sunsite (the famous UNC archive) and tsx-11 at MIT, plus packages from numerous smaller, harder-to-find Linux FTP sites. A growing number of packages originated on this server itself. If you developed Linux software or free software that ran on Linux and needed a distribution site, the webmaster would see what could be done for you.
Kernels
For the impatient, Linux v2.1 development kernels and patches were flown in several times a day, fresh from Finland (or, as the home page joked, from California). For everyone else, the stable v2.0 kernels and patches were mirrored straight from the source. If you did not enjoy debugging, the advice was to stick with 2.0. See Upgrading to kernel v2.0 for the migration notes.
Documentation
The server also mirrored general Linux documentation, including the Linux Documentation Project (LDP), so that HOWTOs and guides were a local hop away rather than a slow trip across the early internet.