Mirroring the EMIS Website
The EMIS website is replicated on a host of mirror sites around the world to ensure fast and reliable access from any location in the World Wide Web.
The following documents are intended for those who want to create or administer a mirror site of EMIS. These documents describe the technical and administrational aspects of the EMIS mirroring system.
It should be noted that EMIS only permits and recognizes those mirrors who adhere to the procedures set forth in these documents. Recognized mirrors are listed on the EMIS website, see the list of EMIS mirror sites.
Some conditions have to be met which are set forth in the legal agreement and the copyright agreement which prospective EMIS mirror sites must accept in order to be recognized.
The permission to mirror the EMIS website is subject to prior approval by the Executive Committee of the EMS.
Although the EMIS website can in principle be hosted on any HTTP server, technical support is only available for web servers running on UNIX operating systems. The following documents are all based on the assumption that the EMIS mirror is installed on an up-to-date UNIX system with permanent Internet access.
The preferred mirroring method uses the rsync program in version 2.4.6 or higher. If it is not included on your UNIX system, it can be obtained and installed from the rsync homepage. The mirroring procedure with rsync is described in the document Creating EMIS Mirror Sites with rsync.
Administrators still using the older, FTP-based mirroring system, should consider migrating to the rsync procedure. How this is done, is described in the document Updating the EMIS Mirroring Procedure.
Prospective EMIS mirror sites must name a mirror administrator who can be contacted by email in the case that there are technical problems or procedural adjustments in the mirroring procedure. Once configured, mirroring takes place automatically, but it still requires a small amount of procedural maintenance. Mirror sites without a responsive technical administration will be removed from the list of recognized EMIS mirror sites.