Mirror.ac.uk To Close 27
bmsleight writes "The UK Mirror Service sadly announces that Lancaster University and the University of Kent have lost the Joint Information Systems Committee contract to jointly provide mirroring services. The mirror service is to shut down from 1st August. This could effect many, many GNU projects mirrored using this service, even before August."
How will this affect anything? (Score:4, Insightful)
Tragic (Score:1, Funny)
Maybe not true? (Score:4, Interesting)
But reading the article (shock - its a small article) it seems like what was turned down was an enhanced mirror, personalisable, RSS based, etc.
They still enterain hopes of running the mirror service "perhaps on a smaller scale".
Sam
Re:Billed per Byte?? What is this, 1967??? (Score:3, Informative)
This is 90s style deregulation at work. Tranatlantic cables are expensive; rather than pass on an ever increasing connection charge to every subscribing university, they set a bandwidth based charge, and let the increasing demand for bandwidth drive the provision.
Re:Effect is a noun. (Score:1, Redundant)
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=effect [reference.com]
tr.v. effected, effecting, effects
Re:Effect is a noun. (Score:2)
OT: Funny modem story. (Score:2)
So, that's a use of the word 'effect' as a verb, but I bet you it wasn't the verb that they were looking for. :)
Actually, this is very sad. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a great, underused and under reported service. Download times on most UK backbones are blazingly fast but these days, with seemingly so much bandwidth around, noone seems to want to worry about using mirrors. I just got the complete gnome 2.6 source at 50kb/s, better that the 11kb/s my DSL link managed from the main site.
I for one will be sad to see it go.
Re:Actually, this is very sad. (Score:2)
Re:Actually, this is very sad. (Score:2)
Re:Actually, this is very sad. (Score:2)
It is just as useful to people with dial-up modems. There's nothing like only getting ~5kB/s at the best of times, and then doubling your download time because a transatlantic link was slow.
Sad News Indeed (Score:5, Informative)
If you get a glitch during a regular download and the MD5's don't match, rsync usually corrects it in a matter of a couple of minutes instead of downloading it all over again.
A great service (Score:3, Informative)
Then again, knowing jisc (and i do) I not convinced they know a good thing when it stands up and shouts "i'm a good thing". Oh well.
Is anything getting lost here? (Score:5, Informative)
Some of the first software that I ever released for public consumption is still on mirror.ac.uk from it's time as HENSA back in the early 90's. So my earliest experience of giving and receiving software for free is intrinsically linked to this site. Cue mist & fade up nostalgia in 3..2..1...
As of this time the JISC don't appear to have announced a replacement, but nostaligia aside, the mirror.ac.uk site discusses termination of mirrors, so I can't help wonder why all data & contracts are not being transferred to the new provider, as would be done if a business were to change hands. This is, after all, a publically funded [jisc.ac.uk] service and one could reasonably expect it to be run in the same way as a government office - the inland revenue records don't get shredded just because a different company has the contract to run the systems; cue mist, cue daydreaming.
Without such agreements in place we risk the loss of some of the earliest pieces of intellectual property and prior art that were put in the public domain.
So I wonder... is anything in mirror.ac.uk going to be lost for good when it closes?
Re:Is anything getting lost here? (Score:1)
Re:Is anything getting lost here? (Score:1)
We should mirror it!
shame (Score:1)
Sunsite Northern Europe (Score:2, Informative)
The loss of mirror.ac.uk cannot be underestimated. It is by fair the fastest, cleanest, and most complete mirror site I've ever used. It will be sorely missed.
It looks like I'll have to turn my /etc/apt/sources.list to point to Sunsite Northern Europe [sunsite.org.uk] instead. Hosted by the Department of Computing [ic.ac.uk] at Imperial College [ic.ac.uk], it was down for a prolonged period while the service was being rebuilt. It is now back up and claims to be ready for use. Doing a test transfer inside the college network, I don't seem to
Re:Sunsite Northern Europe (Score:1)
Was I the only one (Score:2)
Re:Was I the only one (Score:2, Funny)
I knew the chap administrating it at Lancs (Score:1)