What can I seed or mirror on my server to help the world?

January 6, 2013 9:32 AM

I lease a massive server that I am underutilizing. I'd like to use up to 8TB/month of transfer and 500GB of disk space to make the world a better place. I am already seeding Ubuntu distros, Project Gutenberg, and Pearl Jam shows, and I'm looking for more ideas.
posted by quarantine to computers & internet (8 answers total)

OpenStreetMap mirror, or better, an OSM tile mirror.
posted by scruss at 9:46 AM on January 6 [1 favorite]

Run a tor middleman node (low-hassle), bridge (some hassle) or exit node (plenty of hassle).
posted by themel at 10:10 AM on January 6

CTAN the LaTeX package repository? Having a fast link to that would be really useful for a lot of people.
posted by Canageek at 10:15 AM on January 6 [1 favorite]

The Archive Team preserves the user-created content that regular people pour their hearts and lives into publishing, without realizing that the flick of a switch at Yahoo can zorch the whole thing from the internet forever.

Run the ArchiveTeam Warrior, which will automatically participate in digital history rescue projects.
posted by Myself at 10:49 AM on January 6 [3 favorites]

You could run a Debian and/or Ubuntu apt mirror, but you'd need more like 2TB of free disk space for that. You could cut down a lot by choosing just a single architecture (64-bit x86 for example).
posted by thewalrus at 10:56 AM on January 6

I'd be careful with tor, I remember something about a tor node operator being held accountable for traffic going through it. You could use crashplan and have a few of your dearest friends/family backup their important data on your machine. Free of cost.
posted by nostrada at 11:04 AM on January 6

IIRC, NTP was looking for people to join their server pool earlier this year.
posted by pwnguin at 11:12 AM on January 6 [1 favorite]

Wikipedia has a list of distributed computing projects that could use the cycles.
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 5:12 PM on January 6