Our Mirror Server
The department maintains several mirrors of operating-system distributions and other useful material. The mirrors are available for use to the general public, although there are some sections that have access limited to within Harvey Mudd College or the Claremont University Consortium (i.e., software that requires a license to run).
Note that these mirrors are primarily meant to make life easier for the mathematics department's systems administrator, so if we decide to drop CentOS and move to Debian GNU/Linux, we probably won't want to continue to maintain the CentOS mirror for very long.
We would certainly welcome any interest by the college in maintaining mirrors of some or all of the material that we mirror and would be happy to share our maintenance scripts and experience in getting the mirrors set up.
(In fact, if the college wanted to supply some hardware for a bigger, better mirror, the department would be quite happy to provide systems administration for the system.)
CTAN, The Comprehensive TeX Archive Network
We maintain a complete mirror of CTAN, the primary source for TeX and LaTeX packages, support files and programs, and even complete TeX systems for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and other operating systems.
Our CTAN mirror can be found at http://mirror.hmc.edu/ctan/.
CentOS, a Community Rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux
The department has standardized on the CentOS community rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as its Linux distribution of choice. To make installation and maintenance easier, we maintain a complete YUM-enabled archive of CentOS 3 and CentOS 4.
The archive is located at http://mirror.hmc.edu/centos/.
To use it, you'll probably want to add some repository definitions to your YUM configuration:
- For CentOS 3
- Download
yum.conf - Install it as
/etc/yum.confor copy the repository definitions into your existing/etc/yum.conf. - For CentOS 4
- Download
HMC-Math-Base.repo - Add this file to the other repository configuration files in
/etc/yum.repos.d. You will probably want to change theenabledflag in your operating system's default.repofile from1to0to stop attempting to obtain updates from a remote site. - Additional Repos (for CentOS 4)
- You may want to include
our locally built package
repository, or, if you're at Mudd,
our HMC-only repository. (These
configuration stanzas are included in the CentOS
3
yum.conf.)
If you have gpgcheck set to 1 in your
YUM configuration (and you should), you will also need to install
Claire Connelly's GPG
key using rpm --import. This GPG key is used to
sign locally built packages; if a package has been signed with this
key, you can be reasonably sure that the package was actually
built by Claire Connelly. We're still not warrantying
that the software is good, that there are no bugs, or anything
else.
Additional Operating System Mirrors
We also have some other mirrors, some of which are dependent on
particular projects that we're working on or contemplating. Feel
free to look around
in http://mirror.hmc.edu/
to see what else is available.
Debian GNU/Linux
We maintain a mirror
of a subset of the Debian Project's
GNU/Linux ports. Basically, we have mirrors for the
hppa (Hewlett Packard PA-RISC), mips (SGI
MIPS), powerpc (PowerPC—Macs, etc.), and, of course,
i386 (your humble PC). We also mirror the amd64
port.
(Remember what I said about moving to Debian? We're really, really thinking about it....)
Fedora Core
Although we're not crazy enough to run it (Debian
sid is bad enough), we are mirroring Fedora and SRPMs for the Fedora development tree.
Others
At various times we have had copies of distribution trees or ISO images for other distributions.
RPMForge/rpmrepo
We are also maintaining a local mirror of the RPMForge' package repository for Enterprise Linux, which we may use to supplement the standard set of packages in CentOS.
The RPMForge packages will be a significant part of the package selection offered by the new rpmrepo project, to which we also plan to submit packages. A mirror of the rpmrepo packages will be made available once the project starts distributing packages.
