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."

Comments

Sad News Indeed

[terrencefw]

One reason I use mirror.ac.uk is for it's rsync support. You can guarantee that large downloaded files are intact, and repair broken ones by just transferring the corrupt parts.

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.

Is anything getting lost here?

[ear1grey]

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?