Projects / MirrorBrain

MirrorBrain

MirrorBrain is a framework to run a content delivery network using mirror servers. It solves a challenge that many popular open source projects face: a flood of download requests, often magnitudes more than a single site could practically handle. A central (and probably the most obvious) part is a "download redirector" that automatically redirects requests from Web browsers or download programs to a mirror server near them. Choosing a suitable mirror for a user's request is the key, and MirrorBrain uses geolocation and global routing data to make a sensible choice and achieve load-balancing for the mirrors at the same time. The algorithm is both sophisticated and easy to control and tune. In addition, MirrorBrain monitors mirrors, scans them for files, generates mirror lists, and more.

Tags	download Mirroring mirror metalink
Licenses	Apache 2.0 GPLv2
Operating Systems	Linux POSIX
Implementation	C Python

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Recent releases

2.16.0

22 Feb 2012 03:06

Release Notes: The most significant bugfix in this release is for a crash which could (only) occur when fallback mirrors were configured (hardcoded with the MirrorBrainFallback directive in the Apache configuration file). The other fixes are mostly to adjust for newer Python and build environments. The scanner is a little better. URL signing (introduced in 2.14.0) is now considered stable.

2.15.0

14 Nov 2010 19:34

Release Notes: New features: support for generating Yum-style mirror lists. Support for scanning Nginx directory listings. Bugfixes and improvements in the mirror scanner. Extensive directions on tuning PostgreSQL for MirrorBrain.

2.14.0

06 Nov 2010 19:13

Release Notes: MirrorBrain can now use geographical distance as additional criterion in mirror selection. Per-file mirror lists visualize the closest mirrors via Google Maps. Running behind a load balancer or other reverse proxy was tested and a bug was fixed in this regard. MirrorBrain can now be used in conjunction with a multitude of access control mechanisms available in Apache. Experimental support for restricted downloads has been implemented, by redirecting to temporary URLs whose validity can be verified by the mirrors.

2.13.4

20 Oct 2010 21:43

Release Notes: This release improves the usability of the mirror scanner by adding a terse report format (which makes it easy to spot problems), and a totally quiet mode where only errors will be output. It improves usability in some other corners, and adds documentation, notably the added instructions on setting up automatic GeoIP database updates.

2.13.3

26 Sep 2010 12:24

Release Notes: This release fixes two important bugs in the Metalink generator. The first bug was that magnet links embedded in Metalinks could cause clients to hang. The second bug was that under certain conditions (transparent negotiation of metalinks), mod_mirrorbrain could deliver a file "foo" when "foo.bar" was requested but didnt exist. In addition, a number of compatibility fixes for Torrents are included. Ordering of keys was fixed. The md5 key was renamed to md5sum and correctly encoded. A "created by" key was added.