What do I need to mirror CPAN?
- “Good” Internet connectivity, e.g. better than a 14.4 modem but not so much as an OC3.
- Around 1GB of storage space. http://www.cpan.org/indices/du-k.gz tells you the current size of the CPAN.
- An FTP or rsync client.
- For FTP there is a Perl script named mirror (which assumes a command line FTP client):
http://sunsite.org.uk/packages/mirror/The FTP address for the CPAN master site is:
ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/perl/CPAN/ - and for rsync:
http://rsync.samba.org/The rsync addresses for the CPAN master site are:
ftp.funet.fi::CPAN or ftp.sedl.org::cpanOnce you have the rsync client installed on your system and the disk space mapped out, you may then add an entry to your crontab [ if using UNIX, AT if using Windows NT ] like the following example:
* 20 * * * /usr/local/bin/rsync -av --delete ftp.funet.fi::CPAN /project/CPAN/ >/dev/null 2>&1
AT 20:00 /every:M,T,W,Th,F,S,Su "C:\Program Files\Rsync\rsync -av --delete ftp.funet.fi::CPAN /project/CPAN/ >/dev/null 2>&1"
- For FTP there is a Perl script named mirror (which assumes a command line FTP client):