changes to samba ftp and web site

[Andrew Tridgell]

There have been a number of changes recently to the Samba ftp and web
sites. As I have mentioned earlier this is in response to the very
high networking costs of running the site.

First of all, you will notice that the opening page on the web site
points you at a number of web mirror sites. These mirrors sites are
kept very uptodate using rsync. Please use them. If the number of
people using the main site remains too high then I might be forced to
ban all non Australian and New Zealand sites from the pages.

Next, you will notice that the ftp server now puts up a message
telling you about alternate sites when you cd to /pub/samba/. Please
use the site closest to you. If you are not coming from an Australian
or New Zealand site then some subdirectories (currently the
Binary_Packages and old-versions directories) will not be accessible
to you. Use one of the mirror sites instead. I was forced to do this
because too many people are running their own private mirrors of the
complete Samba ftp site. Over 14 GB was downloaded from the
/pub/samba/Binary_Packages directory alone in the last day.

I have also banned all web robots from the site. Up till now I have
allowed web robots but have specified in robots.txt that they should
not traverse certain infinite directory trees. Despite this, large
numbers of robots continued to traverse the site. One such robot
yesterday downloaded 22k files. I now have a policy of detecting and
banning all sites that scan our site with a web robot. 

Finally, if you want to run a mirror site then please read
http://samba.anu.edu.au/samba/mirroring.html

I apologize that such measures have been forced on us, and I hope that
the mirror sites will compensate for any loss of access. 

   - the Samba Team