About us
It started as a spare server under a desk
Northmirror is run by volunteers and paid for by donated capacity.
Origin
Nobody is monetising this
The mirror exists because downloading a distribution should not depend on where you happen to live. There is no company, no premium tier and no plan to add one. Sponsors donate transit and hardware; volunteers run the syncs and carry the pager.
- No account, no rate limit, no logging beyond 24-hour abuse handling
- Every sponsor listed, with what they donate
- Operating costs published annually
One server, three distributions
Under someone's desk, literally.
First rack and donated transit
10 Gbit/s in Frankfurt.
rsync for downstream mirrors
Eleven mirrors pull from us.
Second facility
Helsinki joins, GeoDNS split.
2 × 100 Gbit/s
41 distributions, 18.2 PB a month.
How we work
Boring on purpose
We would rather run software that is three years old and understood than something new that pages us at 04:00.
Own the path
We buy transit from multiple carriers and peer directly wherever it is possible, so a single bad hop is never a single point of failure.
Write it down
Every incident gets a public write-up. Every design decision gets an RFC. Institutional memory beats heroics.
Some of the people behind it
A quarter of the company has been here since the first rack.