Dan Warne03 June 2008, 12:39 PM
Internode has opened a massive Australian SourceForge mirror to the open source community, providing VFF (very flaming fast) downloads to Australian broadband users.
So you like Azureus, BitTorrent, Filezilla, 7-Zip, NASA Worldwind and ClamWin free antivirus, eh? They're all among the most popular open-source software projects housed at SourceForge, which Internode will now be providing a local mirror for.
The new mirror will provide Australian-based copies of most open source software in the world, as SourceForge is the host for the majority of open source projects.
The Internode SourceForge mirror will be open to anyone in the world to download from, however, it will also be fully unmetered for Internode customers, meaning that all those people who have 100GB plans and say they only download Linux ISOs can now move to a 1GB plan, as their Linux downloads will now be unmetered.
Previously, the only Australian SourceForge mirror was run by Optus, but not unmetered for Optus customers.
Most broadband ISPs offer a variety of mirrored content, though it has become less of a necessity for customers since ISPs upped their download limits considerably. ISPs now see it as an opportunity to save money -- rather than paying for the data transfer over international links each time a customer downloads a file, the ISP serves it out of their own data centre.
Internode provides an popular but eclectic mix of mirrored content, some of it quite obviously reflecting the interests of Internode staff and its owner, Simon Hackett. For example, Internode rebroadcasts CD quality music from 80 internet radio stations across its network, and Internode customers who listen to them do not use up their download allowance.
Internode also mirrors Steam game updates, rebroadcasts OfTheWorldTV (an online video service with a range of independent videos inclined towards alternative thought, political activism, environmentally-conscious concepts and humanitarian activities) and a data centre that has 50 physical game servers offering 140 game services.
It says its total mirror size is 32TB (or, for those who still think in gigabytes, 32,000 GB). Now, off you go and download the lot of it...