I'm putting up this page because I noticed that a few people have been
mirroring my site; notably using wget. I have nothing
against that (as long as the robots.txt file is read and obeyed
— which wget does), but it is probably not very
convenient and almost certainly resource-wasteful.
Consequently, I have put up an rsync server to simplify
the mirroring. It serves all the files on my web site, and it is
accessible at rsync://www.eleves.ens.fr:8873/www/.
Quite probably, your web browser does not understand
rsync://-type URLs (I know of none that does, and they
are not even an official standard). However, you can download the rsync
program from rsync.samba.org, and
use it to make sense of the above URL. The advantage of using
rsync over wget is that it is smarter,
faster and more bandwidth-efficient; furthermore, it will preserve
modification times and file access modes verbatim (if asked
to).
Once you have rsync installed, you can use it to mirror
this site by doing
rsync -avcz --delete rsync://www.eleves.ens.fr:8873/www/ /some/directorywhere
/some/directory is the place where you want the
mirror made. Note that if you want to mirror only a subset of this
site, e.g. the computers directory, you can do that with
rsync -avcz --delete rsync://www.eleves.ens.fr:8873/www/computers/ /some/directoryFor more information, please consult the
rsync
documentation.
Please note, once more, that I have nothing against the use of
wget: I merely provide the rsync method as a
convenience. However, please do not use a program
of your own invention to perform a recursive web-suck: this is
very dangerous if you have not properly studied all the
relevant documentation or if you do not follow the standards to the
letter, and it can cause all sorts of problems like log flooding on
the server side, denial of service attacks and so on. If you have any
questions, please do not hesitate to contact me. Also do not
hesitate to contact me if you wish to learn how to set up an
rsync server of your own.
Lastly, if you plan to mirror this site, especially of you wish to make the mirror publicly accessible, please tell me about it. It's just that I like to know about such things.
Thank you for your attention.