mirror-announce@freebsd.org

[Ken Smith]

[ Quick summary: If you are an Official Mirror Site and you have even
a tiny doubt I have the correct email address for your site please
reply to this, straight to me, and at least let me know what your
site's name is.  Don't assume that just because you're on hubs@ you
are taken care of - it's better to reply to this.  Those of you who
replied to my previous message asking for site info for the upcoming
4.9 release do NOT need to do anything - you gave me what I needed
already. ]

Last night the list "mirror-announce at freebsd.org" was created for
us, though I haven't added any addresses to it yet.  I'm not sure
if it will be "ready enough" for the 4.9 release but I'll try.

This list will be mandatory for all Official Mirror Sites and it
will be a strictly "announce only" list - not for discussion (that's
what hubs@ is for :-).  When it is ready this will be where the re@
folks will announce things relevant to releases instead of hubs at .
This is being done for two reasons - hubs@ can at times get a bit
too chatty to be made a *requirement* of all Official Mirror Sites,
and maybe having this be a private list will reduce the chances of
the releases being "announced" (on slashdot for example) before re@
is ready for it.  Please note that because hubs@ is a public list
and anyone can sign up for it I can't use that as a base to build
mirror-announce@ from so just because you're on hubs@ doesn't mean
you'll automatically wind up on mirror-announce at .

Also, upon reflection (read: dealing with tons of SPAM resulting from
my email address being on various Web pages... :-) at this time I
have no intention of adding new places on the Web we list site contact
email addresses.  If that changes we'll check with you beforehand.
I would still like to have two classes of email addresses for every
site though.  Those of you who responded to the previous message should
still be all set, I don't think your answer would change.  What we need
is:

	1) Who we should send email to when announcing things, if we
	   need to contact you because a problem was reported with
	   your site, etc.  For large sites this might be an alias
	   that reaches several tech staff-ers who can handle problems.

	2) Who we should believe if they send email to us asking that
	   information about the site be changed.  Note this needs to
	   be a real email address we'd see in the "From:" headers.
	   If we receive a change request from an unrecognized address
	   we'll try to confirm the request by sending to (1) before we
	   do anything so this will delay processing the request.

If you are a small site there may not be any difference between (1) and
(2), and that's fine.  Larger sites tend to have different answers for
(1) and (2) though.  I'll call (1) the Site Contact and (2) the Site
Maintainer.

So...  Given that if any of you have not replied to my previous message
asking for info about sites for the upcoming FreeBSD 4.9 release here's
the template again:

  FreeBSD name:
  Real site name:
  Site Maintainer(s): [*REAL* email address, who would send us email]
  Site Contact(s): [Who we should send email to]
  Content: [ISO's/release files/packages]
  Access Methods: [FTP/rsync/cvsup/http]
  Upstream Host: [where you feed from]
  Sync Mechanism: [how you download - cvsup/rsync/omi/mirror/etc]

Thanks.

-- 
						Ken Smith
- From there to here, from here to      |       kensmith at cse.buffalo.edu
  there, funny things are everywhere.   |
                      - Theodore Geisel |