Rsync the entire TurnKey library from a mirror close to you in under 5 minutes!

Like TurnKey so much you want a local copy of all the appliances but too lazy to download individual appliance images from SourceForge by hand via browser?

I know exactly how you feel. Sloth is a virtue, and in the beginning was the command line.

So now you can use rsync or ftp to batch download the entire virtual appliance library in whatever build type you like best from a high-speed mirror near you. The way the net gods intended!

Thanks to generous donations of bandwidth and storage space from opensource friendly network samurais around the world TurnKey now has 16 high-speed rsync/ftp capable mirrors in 12 countries: China, Ireland, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Sweden, Japan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Denmark, Argentina, and Israel. And we're just getting started...

This means if your network is good enough you can now grab a copy of the entire TurnKey appliance library in any of the 6 supported build types (ISO, VMDK, OVF, Xen, OpenVZ and OpenStack) from a high-speed (e.g, 10-Gbps) mirror close to you in under 5 minutes.

A few minutes ago in a practice run I rsynced TurnKey images to my Amazon EC2 instance at an average 288 Mbps effective download rate over the network.

Wowsers! Up until I upgraded to a nice SSD a couple of weeks ago that was about as fast as I could copy files on my local hard drive.

If you find these network speeds hard to believe I invite you to log into your TurnKey Hub account and launch a small instance in Ireland. Now let's rsync the entire TurnKey appliance library in Xen format - all 8 GBs worth from the HEAnet mirror:

$ rsync rsync://ftp.heanet.ie/[snip]/turnkeylinux/

Welcome to the HEAnet mirror site, ftp.heanet.ie (http://ftp.heanet.ie/about)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

 NOTE: All connections and transfers are logged; if this is disagreeable,
 please disconnect now.

 * ftp.heanet.ie is located in Dublin, Ireland and operated by HEAnet, the
   Irish National Research and Education Network.

 * This is a four node cluster with 10 Gigabit access to the HEAnet backbone.

 * Please contact mirrors@heanet.ie with any operational queries.

 * You are connected to ftp-node2 (kokapetl)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

drwxr-xr-x         157 2012/02/12 17:05:27 .
drwxr-xr-x        4709 2012/02/08 18:00:08 iso
drwxr-xr-x        5686 2012/02/08 18:00:58 openstack
drwxr-xr-x        5434 2012/02/08 18:01:10 openvz
drwxr-xr-x        4930 2012/02/08 18:01:21 ovf
drwxr-xr-x        2759 2012/01/13 08:31:59 pve
drwxr-xr-x        5014 2012/02/08 18:00:44 vmdk
drwxr-xr-x        5266 2012/02/09 20:41:48 xen

$ time rsync -av -P rsync://ftp.heanet.ie/[snip]/turnkeylinux/xen ./

receiving incremental file list
xen/
xen/turnkey-appengine-11.3-lucid-x86-xen.tar.bz2
   299570436 100%   30.43MB/s    0:00:09 (xfer#1, to-check=83/85)
xen/turnkey-appengine-11.3-lucid-x86-xen.tar.bz2.sig
         490 100%    0.38kB/s    0:00:01 (xfer#2, to-check=82/85)
xen/turnkey-bugzilla-11.3-lucid-x86-xen.tar.bz2
   191193216 100%   34.68MB/s    0:00:05 (xfer#3, to-check=81/85)
xen/turnkey-bugzilla-11.3-lucid-x86-xen.tar.bz2.sig
         490 100%    0.48kB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#4, to-check=80/85)

[ .. snip .. ]

sent 1629 bytes  received 7993104501 bytes  36919658.80 bytes/sec
total size is 7992120707  speedup is 1.00

real    3m35.152s
user    0m29.290s
sys     0m30.220s

$

Speaking with the authority of someone that used to download shareware from a local BBS 20,000 times slower (I.e., 6MB/hour on a 14400 baud modem) I can unequivocally state that this is just friggin awesome. The future is now!

Shouts out to TurnKey mirror best buddies all over the globe:

• Zhang from the USTC Linux User Group in China
• James from Bytemark hosting in the UK
• Arnoud from LIP6 in France, and Manuel from Ircam, also in France
• Carsten from RWTH Aachen in Germany
• Mattias from Umea Uni in Sweden
• Mitry from Beltelecom MGTS in Belarus
• Boian from IPACCT in Bulgaria
• Georg from dotsrc.org in Denmark
• Ariel from Cooperativa Telefonica in Argentina
• Lior from the Israel Internet Association in Israel

Not yet a TurnKey mirror best buddy but thinking you might want to be? If you have the resources to provide a mirror for TurnKey in your country reach out to our global mirror commando team 24 hours a day in any real or fictional language!