Welcome to astrolabe
You're still on astrolabe, the mirrors server of the Johns Hopkins University ACM chapter.A short story
In late 2004, Asheesh Laroia set up this server because he wanted fast Debian downloads in the ACM office. Its use has grown (see feeping creaturism) and will continue to grow until its disks fill up. Again.
Hardware
Once, Astrolabe was using a tall case that supported a table. It only had 284 MiB of RAM and one 600 Mhz Pentium !!! to push data off a 277 GiB array of IDE disks.
Now, having discovered what cases like that did to IDE disks over a period of time, Astrolabe has a beastly 4 GB of RAM and 6 TB of mostly-SATA disks with which it happily serves as a mirror for anything we ever cared about.
Why the name?
An astrolabe will tell you how to get where you want to go. That's really what downloading is about.
If you're not convinced, think of the R.E.M. song, "I've been there, I know the way".
Who's responsible for this?
- The JHU ACM Chapter provides resources for students at JHU interested in computing to work together. Like this server.
- The Association for Computing Machinery is the world's first educational and scientific computing society.
- The Johns Hopkins University is the first research university in the United States of America. "Veritas vos liberabit" is its official motto.
"Thank you for being there for me / Thank you for listening / Goodbye."
The JHU ACM would like to thank:- JHU's Computer Science department for helping us learn inside and outside the classroom.
- (Special thanks to Dr. Scott Smith, our faculty advisor, and Steve Rifkin, CS Network Services Manager.)
- The projects whose data we mirror.
- Asheesh Laroia, for donating the big IDE disks originally in this machine.
- JHU's computer science department, again, for donating the hardware currently backing astrolabe after a catastrophic motherboard failure. :)
- The JHU Student Activities Commission, for graciously continuing to feed our ever-expanding need to mirror the world.