We use a lot of open source software in our team and we try to contribute a little back to the community when we can. The central mail relay, Oxmail, had been using ClamAV since sometime between 2003 and 2005 and when we discovered that we could host a public mirror of the signature databases we set one up in 2007.
This was an apache vhost on our team webserver running on a trusty IBM eServer xSeries 336. That server was only recently decommissioned after having given 12 years of faultless production service. In 2013, the mirror was moved to a dedicated webserver running in a VM.
The ClamAV project was acquired by Sourcefire in 2007, which itself was acquired by Cisco in 2013. Over the summer, Cisco changed the DNS records that clients should use to find a mirror to point to Cloudflare’s content delivery network. Our mirror still received thousands of hits per day from clients that had presumably hard-coded our mirror’s IP address in their config. We recently learnt that Cisco had silently stopped updating the signature databases on volunteer mirrors and so our mirror was serving stale data. We considered it better to stop serving altogether rather than to give clients out-of-date signatures and so switched off our mirror today.
In our busiest month over the past 11 years of service, our mirror served up 17 TB of data at a peak transfer rate of 8 Gb/s.