MIT has a local slave connected to the STAR master database server. A dbServers.xml with the following content will allow you to connect to it:
<StDbServer>
<server> star1 </server>
<host> star1.lns.mit.edu </host>
<port> 3316 </port>
<socket> /tmp/mysql.3316.sock </socket>
</StDbServer>For more information on selecting database mirrors please visit this page. You can also view a heartbeat of all the STAR database slaves here. Finally, if you're interested in setting up your own database slave, Michael DePhillips has put some preliminary instructions on the