Setting up an SA Update Mirror

A mirror for sa-update requires very little to work to setup:

  • The ASF SpamAssassin PMC approves the mirror which is vetted for stability, security and proven support for the anti-spam community. As of 7/5/2013, it is highly desired that all mirrors be able to provide IPv4 and IPv6 capabilities.
  • The mirror sets up a webserver: We recommend the convention of sa-update.<domain> such as sa-update.pccc.com
  • All of the files for the webserver are static so the mirror I run uses what we call a "light-weight" Apache httpd server using very minimal modules. With Apache httpd 2.2, this is just authz_host_module, log_config_module, mime_module & dir_module.
  • Setup a cron job that updates the mirror via rsync every 10 minutes:
    For example, this command updates a published html directory in /htdocs
    /usr/bin/rsync --timeout=280 -T /tmp -ta --delete rsync.spamassassin.org::updates /usr/local/apach2/htdocs/sa-update.<domain>/html > /dev/null 2>&1
  • The PMC tests the mirror and updates the MIRRORED.BY file to let sa-update clients start using the mirror.
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