Freeware Mirror Sites

These sites have graciously mirrored the freeware archive:

• The Case Western Reserve University UNIX Users Group in Cleveland, Ohio, USA
  • http://sigunix.cwru.edu/pub/sgi/freeware/
  • ftp://sigunix.cwru.edu/pub/sgi/freeware/
• Planet Mirror in Australia
  • http://sgifreeware.planetmirror.com/
  • ftp://sgifreeware.planetmirror.com/pub/sgifreeware/index.html
• AARNet's Mirror Project, accessible in Australia/New Zealand only
  • http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/sgi/freeware/
  • ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/sgi/freeware/
• Informed Technology's FTP archives in Australia
  • http://ftp.it.net.au/sgifreeware/
  • ftp://ftp.it.net.au/mirrors/sgifreeware/
• The University of Wroclaw in Poland
  • http://www.uni.wroc.pl/sgi_freeware/
  • ftp://www.uni.wroc.pl/pub/sgi_freeware/
• PLiG in the United Kingdom
  • http://ftp.plig.org/pub/sgi/
  • ftp://ftp.plig.org/pub/sgi/
• Max-Planck-Institute for Computer Sciences in Germany
  • ftp://ftp.mpi-sb.mpg.de/pub/irix/mirror/freeware.sgi.com/

We make no guarantees about how up-to-date, complete, or reliable their services are. We are merely putting this reference here for your convenience. If any of these sites become stale, please let us know so that we can update this document!

If you wish to mirror the site yourself you may find rsync or wget useful. The former is more automatic, but if you prefer wget some users suggest the following:

Here is a command to mirror the tardist (and index.html) files to the current directory. I have gotten best results when I have removed the index.html file before attempting to mirror the directory.

    wget --mirror ftp://freeware.sgi.com/Dist \
        -Atardist -np -nH --cut-dirs=1 -o /tmp/wget.log

If you have a proxy you need the ftp_proxy shell variable set or that variable set in /usr/freeware/etc/wgetrc. To be safe I also set the FTP_PROXY variable to the same value as ftp_proxy.

    ftp_proxy=http://your_proxy:ftp_port_number/

    wget --mirror -Yon ftp://freeware.sgi.com/Dist \
        -Atardist -np -nH --cut-dirs=1 -o /tmp/wget.log

The only problem with this setup is that if there is an error on the server you might end up with a tardist file with a size of 175 bytes with the following content:

    <TITLE>FTP Error</TITLE>
    <H1>FTP Error</H1>
    <h2>Could not login to FTP server</h2>
    <PRE>Sorry, freeware.sgi.com already has 27 users logged on.  Try again in
    10 minutes.</PRE>

Not much fun! You can detect this problem with the following script which tests the tardist files. The erroneous tardists are listed in /tmp/aa. Remember to delete /tmp/aa between each run or you might get error messages later if you try to use the one-liner to remove the files.

    for aa in *.tardist ; do 
        tar tvf $aa > /dev/null ; xx=$? ; 
        if [ 0 != $xx ] ; then echo $aa >> /tmp/aa ; fi ; 
    done

You can remove the problem files with the following one-liner (run in the same directory):

    cat aa | xargs rm -f

Here is a command that untars the files:

    for aa in *.tardist ; do 
        tar xof $aa ; xx=$? ; 
        if [ 0 != $xx ] ; then echo $aa >> /tmp/aa ; fi ; 
    done