[fedora-india] Media production -> Meet next saturday?

[Debarshi Ray]

> Currently, mirrors are a major pain point. We don't have enough of
> them. And, yet, we have a growing set of people from institutions who
> are contributing to and participating in The Fedora Project. Why are
> they unable to convince their college authorities to set up mirrors ?

As someone who had once walked along this path, I have a feeling that
this is very difficult to sustain without teachers who "get it".

If you want a student to spearhead this in a college, then you need to
be looking at second year students. But how many second year students
do we have who are regular contributors? Third and final years don't
count because by the time they will be able to cut through the
bureaucratic red tape her time will be up, and unless you have a
junior lined up the whole effort will be a waste. Right now it is a
bit hard to expect a free software contributor [1] in every batch with
the patience, tact and skills to work around the red tape. :-)

Running a public mirror will have some side-effects on the institute's
network and if you can not get influential members of the faculty to
buy in to the idea, then you are in trouble. Given the level of
expertise of the system administrators hired by some of our "premier"
institutes, this can be a major pain.

Having said that, IIT Madras seems to have got it right.

> That might be a part we should be looking at. For the existing
> mirrors, do they have a proper set of admins in place ? For example,
> GLUG-NITH's mirror has gone down in quality so much that it might
> pretty well not exist.

This is heart breaking. Being out of the country, I have not been
using it myself. Last I heard that there was work going on in the
computer centre causing a temporary interruption in service.

But honestly, I don't expect them to put up a good show, and bandwidth
or hardware is not the problem.

Cheers,
Debarshi

[1] Those who think of contributing only when Google Summer of Code
comes around the corner do not fall under the definition of free
software contributor.

-- 
"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's
character, give him power."
    -- Abraham Lincoln