Heanet Upgrades

ftp.heanet.ie now comprises over 12 Terabytes of storage, 32 Gigabytes of RAM and a new 136 Gigabyte RAID-0 caching layer for popular content. We hope that this level of storage will unperin an effective service, meeting current and future requirements.
ftp.heanet.ie’s network connectivity has also been significantly upgraded and there are changes which may of interest;
ftp.heanet.ie serves content over FTP, HTTP and RSYNC and is
available over IPv4 and IPv6. Clients should correctly resolve the IP
version supported; however, the ftp.ipv4.heanet.ie and
ftp.ipv6.heanet.ie records facilitate manual specification of the IP
version to be used.
For some time now ftp.heanet.ie has tagged all outgoing traffic with
a differential services code-point (DSCP) IP header value of 0x08
which is the conventional value assigned to “Less than Best Effort”
(LBE). This means that even with a minimal IP Quality of Service (QoS)
configuration on your network it is possible to de-prioritise traffic
from ftp.heanet.ie. This also enables HEAnet and GÉANT to ensure that
ftp.heanet.ie traffic does not contend with customer traffic.
ftp.heanet.ie now supports Jumboframes of up to 9000 bytes in size
Traditionally ethernet and general internal traffic is restricted to
sending frames of 1500 bytes in size. A file 1 Megabyte in size took
about 750 sent packets to download. With Jumboframes, this can now
be achieved in fewer than 120 packets. This can represent a major
speed increase, and we’ve been able to download entire DVD ISO’s in
9 seconds in testing with jumboframes enabled. HEAnet currently
extends jumboframe connectivity to the GEANT network.
ftp.heanet.ie now sports 4 Gigabit/sec of load-balanced out-bound
connectivity, and 2 Gigabit/sec of resilient in-bound connectivity.
This connectivity is in place in order to cope with future peak
demands and is not intended for immediate use, so rate-limits at 1.5
Gigabit/sec are currently in-place. Further to this, we are committed
to ensuring no contention with other general internet or customer
traffic through the use of QoS configurations.
We have also taken the opportunity of the migration to revise and renew the content of the mirror. Over three years of usage, some files have become corrupted due to local and remote problems. We rely on user reports of such errors and always try to rectify them as quickly on possible, however now we are in a position to do more;
We have re-synced from scratch many of our popular items. For
example, we have re-synced the entire RedHat tree (some 256Gb
of content) and manually verified its contents. We have also
checked some 50,000 Debian packages and re-synced approximately
100 from our Debian archive.
We now have the CPU and spare I/O capacity to start automated
checksum verification for as much of our content as we are
in a position to verify, and are putting this system in place.