On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 3:53 PM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
Image dumps haven't worked reliably since
sometime in 2005. I blogged about
this in mid-2006, at which point I believe there was a bittorrent option but
no other; the bittorrent option hasn't worked for over a year.
http://downloads.wikimedia.org/images/ used to offer a few 2006-era
dump links; those too are now gone.
[snip]
For several months one of the Wikimedia systems was configured to push
images out to a system of mine with several terrabytes set aside, via
the then-development version 3 of rsync. (prior versions of rsync were
unable to cope with the large number of files)
This worked fairly well at the time and I handed out snapshots to a
number of other people who requested them.
The feed seems to have stopped in early January. I never bothered
looking into why, since I haven't been doing much with them recently
and no one has asked me for a new snapshot lately.
Bittorrent is pretty much non-viable for maintaining a mirror of
images (and nearly so for even making the initial several tbyte
transfer).