If you become an official CTAN mirror:
How much physical space is required (i.e.15GB)?
32GB (2013: between 20GB and 30GB).
How many times a year should TeX repositories get updated by new versions of TeX packages?
Once a day.
Time, resources, staff required for maintenance of the repository
One day to install, configure, initialize and test your server (BSD* or Linux + Apache + Cron job to perform automatic mirroring operation).
One minute per day to verify the automatic mirroring operation.
How much data is downloaded from TeX repository per day/month?
Depending on the number of users and the bandwidth of your server (my public mirror in 2016: between 1500GB and 2500GB per month).
Example of cron job (FreeBSD):
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;
my $server = "rsync.dante.ctan.org";
my $local_copy = "/var/ctan-mirror";
my @rsync_comm = (
"/usr/local/bin/rsync",
"-a",
"--delete",
"--no-motd",
"--stats",
"rsync://$server/CTAN/",
$local_copy,
);
my $date = localtime();
print "$date: Starting CT(eX)AN synchronisation...\n";
my $status = system @rsync_comm;
if ($status != 0) {
print "WARNING !!!\n";
if ($? == -1) {
print "failed to execute: $!\n";
} elsif ($? & 127) {
printf "child died with signal %d, %s coredump\n",
($? & 127), ($? & 128) ? 'with' : 'without';
} else {
printf "child exited with value %d\n", $? >> 8;
}
}
$date = localtime();
printf "fix permissions...\n";
system("/usr/bin/find '$local_copy' -type f -perm +0111 -ls -exec chmod 644 {} \\; | wc -l");
print "$date: Ending CT(eX)AN synchronisation...\n";
Example of Apache (2.2) configuration:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName ctan.example.com
DocumentRoot /var/ctan-mirror
<Directory "/var/ctan-mirror">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
IndexOptions FancyIndexing NameWidth=* VersionSort HTMLTable
IndexOptions Charset=UTF-8 SuppressIcon SuppressRules
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
:)
I sincerely wish you can get it to work and am happy to see people who take the plunge and so it!/pub
dir was free to host a CTAN Mirror and told them we only had one mirror in Brazil. I think the maintainers' mathematical background persuaded them :)