Putty Mirroring guidelines
If you want to set up a mirror of the PuTTY website, go ahead and set one up. Please don’t bother asking us for permission before setting up a mirror. You already have permission.
If the mirror is in a country where we don’t already have plenty of mirrors, we may be willing to add it to the list on this page. Read the guidelines below, make sure your mirror works, and email us the information listed at the bottom of the page.
NOTE: We do not promise to list your mirror, or anyone’s. We get a lot of mirror notifications, and yours may not happen to find its way to the top of the list.
NOTE also: as of 2007-12-20, we link to all our mirror sites using the rel="nofollow" attribute. Running a PuTTY mirror is not intended to be a cheap way to gain search rankings.
The preferred (and simplest) way to mirror the PuTTY website is to use rsync. We provide a version of the website content intended for use as a standalone mirror, at rsync://rsync.chiark.greenend.org.uk/ftp/users/sgtatham/putty-website-mirror. So you could set up a mirror by running a cron job which issued a command something like this every day:
rsync -auH rsync://rsync.chiark.greenend.org.uk/ftp/users/sgtatham/putty-website-mirror/ .You should run this command inside the directory where you plan to put the mirror; when that command is run, it will fill the current directory with HTML files and subdirectories. Alternatively, you can replace . with the name of the target directory.
If you use the above command to fetch our pre-packaged mirror site, it will only work as designed if your web server is Apache: the site contains a .htaccess file which handles a couple of non-obvious MIME types and deals with making the virtual subdirectory “latest” redirect to the current latest release. You may need to configure Apache to honour the .htaccess file with a directive such as AllowOverride. If you do not use Apache, you will have to reproduce this behaviour in some other way suitable for your own web server.
(We prefer that the “latest” redirect be handled as an HTTP-visible redirect, rather than a server-side filesystem tweak such as a symlink, for better behaviour in the face of web caches.)
Since rsync is incremental, there should be no reason not to update frequently, although currently there’s no point in doing so more often than once a day. In any case, we would recommend updating no less often than once a week, in order to fetch any urgent updates such as security bugfixes. You can also subscribe to our mailing list to receive notification of new releases.
We used to support an alternative method of mirroring using GNU wget, and provided a sample shell script. This is now deprecated in favour of rsync, for the following reasons:
rsyncuses less bandwidth;- the
rsyncmethod moves all the post-processing complexity to our end, so we can implement changes and deal with bugs much more easily – and in particular, it allows us to insert a note to the effect that the mirrored site is a mirror site to reduce general confusion; - we’ve had trouble in the past with mirroring
wgets going mad and eating all our host’s bandwidth/CPU, whichrsynchasn’t yet done, to our knowledge.
Once you’ve set up your mirror, mail us with its address and the country it’s in. However, before notifying us, please do test that it works:
- Check that the binary download links work.
- Check that the binary download links point at your site, not ours. If they point straight back to our own binary downloads, there is not much point in having the mirror site in the first place!
- Check that the on-line documentation for the latest release works, and points at your site not ours.