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    SPIRES Hosting a Mirror Site

    The SPIRES-HEP system serves the worldwide High-Energy Physics community, providing a valuable resource for information about research and publications. The SPIRES-HEP system was started at SLAC in 1974, and has since grow into a collaboration of many institutions and mirror sites coordinated by SLAC. If you and your institution would like to join the list of mirror sites, we have prepared this outline of the requirements and responsibilities involved.

    If you are interested, please contact Travis Brooks, SPIRES Scientific Databases Manager at 1.650.926.3426, or via email at travis@slac.stanford.edu.

    The SPIRES-HEP system is built on the SPIRES Database Management System. This is a robust database management system that was developed at Stanford University and is the corner-stone system for managing the information in SPIRES-HEP on Unix platforms. Additionally, there is a web-interface to SPIRES that requires a web server and web server software.

    The mirror site must be up and running about 99% of the time. This should be maintained on a "best effort" basis.

    Institutional Requirements

    • Unix-SPIRES Collaboration. Institutions must be members of the Unix-SPIRES Collaboration.
    • Travel Support. Institutions must commit sufficient funds yearly so that the mirror site administrator and/or technical administrator can travel to SLAC for a minimum of one week per year to work on mirror-site and SPIRES-HEP development issues with the SLAC SPIRES staff.
    • Contact Person. Your institution must provide us with a contact person. It would be helpful if this person also functioned as the technical administrator, but that is not a requirement. We will need name, phone number, address, and email address of this person. This person will work with the SLAC staff on all issues relating to the mirror site and be the interface back to your institution.

    Technical Requirements

    • Hardware. Machine running the UNIX or LINUX operating systems with a minimum of 128 MB Ram and 6 to 10 GB of hard drive space available for SPIRES and the SPIRES-HEP databases. Big endian machines (most Sun, HP) are much faster with Unix SPIRES and this is preferred. However, little endian machines (LINUX) can be used.
    • Networking. Your machine should have a reliable connection to the Internet that runs at least at T1 speeds if not faster. All installations are done over the Internet, and require transfers of large amounts of files. Also, we must be assured of at least moderate access speeds for users of your mirror site.
    • Software. You must have ftp, ssh, the GNU software bundle (including gcc and gunzip), a web server software package (Apache), perl and rsync (both free).
    • Support. You must provide us with the name and contact information for your UNIX administrator.
    • Web Server Support. The web interface to SPIRES-HEP requires a web server machine and web server software. You can either run the web server software on the same machine as the SPIRES database management system, or you may utilize your institutions web server. Installing the SPIRES web interface onto a web server is very simple and does not have much impact on the web server itself. It is desirable to have the web server software located on your institution's web server, as then we are assured of the reliability of that service. You will need about 15Kb of free space for the files related to the web server.

    Administrative Requirements

    • Technical Administrator. Mirror site must have a designated technical administrator. This is the person that will work with the SLAC staff to install and/or update databases. It is preferable that this person also be the site contact person, but it is not a requirement.
    • Statistics. Mirror site must run statistics gathering programs on a daily and monthly basis that will write out statistics pages to the web. These usage statistics help SLAC manage the database's improvements and future plans.
    • Technical knowledge. Technical administrator must have fair knowledge of UNIX and be willing to develop basic knowledge of SPIRES. The person will have to run nightly updates to the SPIRES-HEP databases, update other parts of the mirror system, and generally maintain a stable computing environment that ensures the mirror is running and available on a "best effort" basis.

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    Last Updated: 8 March 2005
    Owner: P. Kreitz at SLAC
    File: /library/spires-hep-mirror.html