Posted: 2026-01-19
Freya, our router at the top of our 1/3 cabinet, is now mirroring OpenBSD. This is the fastest option for our VPS customers and may be a suitable mirror for many in the PNW (Pacific North West.)
This allows you to syspatch and pull packages. It does not include firmware, however. For those not aware, our 1/3 cabinet is located in Spokane, WA and is currently served by a 100Mbit/sec connection.
However, not without caveats. Nothing older than 7.8 is mirrored. Only AMD64 is mirrored. Snapshots are not mirrored. debug-* packages and some very large packages (mostly games) are excluded. When 7.9 comes out, I'll have it mirror the two most recent releases and keep that moving forward.
It's also IPv6 only, which I believe may help cut back on heavy crawlers, but time will tell.
There is a chance that this mirror will have to only serve Slow Servers, itself, but I am hoping to leave it open. For one, it's definitely the closest mirror for me. I have heard bad things about crawlers on mirror sites. robots.txt is in place to disallow everything, so hopefully that will take care of it if IPv6-only doesn't already.
This mirror doesn't meet the criteria to be listed as an official OpenBSD mirror. It's a bit too much for me to consider right now. Aside from the disk space, the bandwidth for maintaining OpenBSD snapshots is significant. Also, the closest mirror isn't always the fastest, but to some that isn't the most important factor (provided that it's fast enough.)
It listens on HTTPS and HTTP. Inside our 1/3 cabinet, there's probably no reason to use HTTPS. Outside, some may find HTTPS preferable.
Should it also be accessible over a .onion? .i2p? Let me know!
Not sure there's any use making it Gemini accessible.