After months of tinkering, with I’m pleased to announce that MusicBrainz now has a mirror in Germany. The de.musicbrainz.org mirror is graciously being sponsored by HousePool Media International Group — many thanks to Carsten Marmulla for working hard over a number of months to find a hardware and bandwidth to support this mirror.
Our two mirrors (.de and .nl) are currently underutilized, but the upcoming release of Picard will have support for tagging of mirror servers. We’ll have to encourage users to use the mirrors for tagging, so that the main server can stay available for people wanting to make changes to the database or vote on pending changes.
What kind of hardware spec is required for running a mirror, and how much bandwidth should be made available?
The main server, which does a lot of web service hits, moderations and downloads, pushed 8,673,336 KBytes per day on average. A mirror would use a fraction of that.
As far as hardware is concerned, a dual processor box with 1-4Gb of RAM is really best suited. Anything that can be considered a ‘database server class’ machine would work great.
Mirror in Germany means that the location of this Server is in Germany but the spelling is english ?!
Did you get proper translators for the mirror? There really is nothing worse than a mirror site in another language where only software is used to translate the language. I’ve often seen sites translated into English and it is frustrating. I’m sure it’s the same when English sites are simply translated to other languages without any proper translation (ie, only done by software.)