A cron script is run nightly to update the archive, and a separate script is run once weekly to mail access logs back to Tucson. The archive scripts directory is mirrored separately to a different directory, in part because execute permissions are stripped in the mirroring process and in part so new code may be hand checked, as a security measure. The UK mirror was already serving Web documents and had a configured HTTP server. New sites, or those using the CD-ROM, may need to configure a server. The only changes required to support the mirror were alias definitions for the IRAF CGI scripts directory.
Web scripts directory on the mirror, and aliases for the root-relative links.
One other problem is that most HTTP servers define a default MIME type as plain text for documents for which the server cannot determine the type from the file name extension. This means that tar files, compressed PostScript files, etc., show up as jumbled text in the browser rather than being identified as binary or starting an external viewer. This causes the most browsers to create a save pop-up window rather than trying to display the file, which is what is most often desired. An HTTP server must be running in order for CGI scripting to work, otherwise all documents are accessed with a file URL and scripts will not execute. At present, the archive only contains binaries used by CGI scripts for those mirror platforms we know about.