Michael Fitzpatrick
NOAO
Doug Tody
NOAO
Dave Terrett
Rutherford Appleton Laboratories
Large anonymous FTP archives have long used mirrors (copies of the network archive maintained on remote hosts) to decrease the load on a particular server or shorten the network path to provide faster download times. Little has been done however to simplify mirroring of WWW (World Wide Web) pages, although many projects and users now rely on Web pages at least as heavily as anonymous FTP services. With the dramatically increasing use of the global Internet in the past year the network has become overloaded, and network access, especially overseas, is often very slow during peak hours. We present a strategy based on host-independent URLs which allows Web pages to be automatically mirrored to both remote Web hosts and CD-ROMs.