Project History
This project started as a hobby of students in the Halifax dormitory of RWTH Aachen University. Using spare and loaned hardware in combination with the generous Gigabit network link provided by the university's computing center, the first incarnation of 'ftp.halifax.RWTH-Aachen.DE' provided about a TByte of data, mostly Linux distributions. In addition to the obligatory HTTP and FTP services, the server offered RSYNC access. Furthermore, which was uncommon for FTP servers, several 'hot' files were seeded using BitTorrent. This way, the server managed to put out up to 1.7 GBit/sec after some new software release.
To combat stability issues, the team tried to get hold of better server hardware. Thanks to the university's computing center (providing housing, storage and network connectivity), Offensive Security for a RAM upgrade, and Fujitsu (providing the server hardware) the server offered more data with higher speeds from 2010 to 2015. At peak times up to 9.81 GBit/sec were served.
At the end of 2015, the RWTH Aachen University IT Center organized replacement hardware.
With this hardware we can offer even more data, now at up to 20 GBit/sec.
