Slashdot Mirror
Mirror.ac.uk To Close
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."
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.
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
mirror.ac.uk have done a great job for many years, it is unfortunate that they lost the contract, though i hope that the service from the new provider will be as good if not better.
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.
You bought her a Kentucky Fried Chicken Franchise!!!
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 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?
boakes.org
Hey, this is supposed to be the 21rst century...not the 19th century, get with it..
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.
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 instead. Hosted by the Department of Computing at Imperial College, 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 be getting much more than around 270kBps throughput, and I always got much better results from mirror.ac.uk, but they may still be ironing out some problems.