How to become an Open MPI mirror site

The Open MPI Team greatly appreciates any new mirror site. There are four main steps to becoming an official Open MPI mirror site:

• Please read the following guidelines:
1. Open MPI web mirrors must support serving PHP4 web pages. The Open MPI web pages use some esoteric PHP functionality, such as the curl functions. Hence, be sure that your web server supports the PHP curl extensions (e.g., view this page and ensure that your server shows the same content that is displayed on the main Open MPI web site).
2. Please join the Open MPI mirrors mailing list. This is a very low-volume mailing list that we use for sending out announcements, problems with mirror sites, etc. Questions, comments, and suggestions about the mirroring process can also be sent to this list.
3. Please update your mirror site at least once a week. We recognize that not all sites have the bandwidth luxury to update every day (note that Subversion is quite efficient and transfers very little data, especially if the Open MPI web site has not changed since your last update). However, we would like to have mirror sites that are at least "mostly current" with the main web site.
• Send the following information to the Open MPI mirrors list:
  1. Text for the tagline for your mirror site. This text appears on both the main mirror list and on the lower left corner of every page on your mirror site. This text is typically the physical location of your mirror site.
  2. The physical location of your server. We organize the list by location.
  3. The official URL for your mirror site. This will be added to the main Open MPI mirror list.
  4. The hostname of the server that will be serving the web pages. This is for cross-referencing so that the correct tagline will be displayed; typically it is the same hostname as used in your official URL (specifically, it is what is returned by PHP's $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"]).
• Obtain a copy of the Open MPI web site. There are two main mechanisms to obtain / update your mirror: Subversion and rsync.
  1. Using Subversion

     The web pages can be anonymously checked out from Subversion:

     shell$ cd /path/to/your/docroot shell$ svn co http://svn.open-mpi.org/svn/ompi-www/trunk .

     Create an automated process to run "svn up" in your checkout at whatever frequency you want (see the guidelines, above). This will keep you web pages up to date. An easy way to do this is to add a crontab entry for a user who has write permissions in the Open MPI docroot tree. The follow sample crontab entry updates the tree at 4:23am every morning:

     23 4 * * * cd /path/to/your/docroot; svn up

     Alternatively, a slightly more elegant mechanism to update and mail someone only if there are errors would be to use the following script:

     #!/bin/sh # Open MPI web site mirroring script: Subversion synchronization # Replace this with the path to your docroot docroot=/path/to/your/docroot # Replace this with a directory that can be used for temporary files tmpdir=/tmp # Do the update stdout="$tmpdir/open-mpi-mirror-update.$$.out" stderr="$tmpdir/open-mpi-mirror-update.$$.err" cd "$docroot" svn up > "$stdout" 2> "$stderr" status=$? # This timestamp is included in the footer of pages to indicate the # last time the mirror was updated rm -f includes/when_mirrored.inc date > includes/when_mirrored.inc # Check for error if test "$status" != "0"; then cat <<EOF There was a problem with updating the Open MPI mirror; "svn up" exited with a status code of $status. --Standard output---------------------------------------------------------- `cat "$stdout"` --Standard output---------------------------------------------------------- --Standard error----------------------------------------------------------- `cat "$stderr"` --Standard error----------------------------------------------------------- EOF fi rm -f "$stdout" "$stderr" exit 0

  2. Using rsync

     The web pages can be anonymously obtained via rsync:

     shell$ rsync -r -p -t -D -L -H --copy-unsafe-links --delete --delete-excluded \ --delete-after --force www.open-mpi.org::ompi_web /your/local/docroot

     Create an automated process to run this rsync command at whatever frequency you want (see the guidelines, above). This will keep you web pages up to date. An easy way to do this is to add a crontab entry for a user who has write permissions in the Open MPI docroot tree. The follow sample crontab entry updates the tree at 4:23am every morning:

     23 4 * * * rsync -r -p -t -D -L -H --copy-unsafe-links --delete --delete-excluded \ --delete-after --force www.open-mpi.org::ompi_web /your/local/docroot

     Alternatively, a slightly more elegant mechanism to update and mail someone only if there are errors would be to use essentially the same script that is listed in the Subversion method (above) but replace the "svn up" command with the "rsync ..." command:

     #!/bin/sh # Open MPI web site mirroring script: rsync synchronization # Replace this with the path to your docroot docroot=/path/to/your/docroot # Replace this with a directory that can be used for temporary files tmpdir=/tmp # Do the update stdout="$tmpdir/open-mpi-mirror-update.$$.out" stderr="$tmpdir/open-mpi-mirror-update.$$.err" cd "$docroot" rsync -r -p -t -D -L -H --copy-unsafe-links --delete --delete-excluded \ --delete-after --force www.open-mpi.org::ompi_web /your/local/docroot > "$stdout" 2> "$stderr" status=$? # This timestamp is included in the footer of pages to indicate the # last time the mirror was updated rm -f includes/when_mirrored.inc date > includes/when_mirrored.inc # Check for error if test "$status" != "0"; then cat <<EOF There was a problem with updating the Open MPI mirror; "svn up" exited with a status code of $status. --Standard output---------------------------------------------------------- `cat "$stdout"` --Standard output---------------------------------------------------------- --Standard error----------------------------------------------------------- `cat "$stderr"` --Standard error----------------------------------------------------------- EOF fi rm -f "$stdout" "$stderr" exit 0

• The first time you mirror the OMPI web site, a black skull-nand-crossbones flag will appear in the lower left of all your web pages. This is normal!
  1. Once you have a basic mirror site working properly, send your mirror site entry information to the "mirrors" mailing list and we'll add your information to the site PHP. This will enable your country's flag to appear in the lower left instead of the Jolly Roger.
  2. Let an automatic update occur to get the PHP change. If all of this goes well, let us know, and we'll update the PHP again to display your mirror in the official listing (which all sites will pick up via the normal mirror updating mechanisms).

Thanks!