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Mirror.ac.uk To Close

Posted by timothy on from the line-up-alternatives dept.

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."

6 of 27 comments (clear)

  1. How will this affect anything? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They lost the contract to do mirroring, so presumably it will be done by whomever won the contract?

  2. Maybe not true? by samjam · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I understood one reason for the mirror was than JANET (Joint Academic NETwork) were being billed per byte for UK-bound transatlantic traffic.

    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

    --
    blog.sam.liddicott.com
  3. Actually, this is very sad. by deggy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I use the UK mirror service alot, even since university and now five years on.

    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.

  4. Sad News Indeed by terrencefw · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.

    --
    Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
  5. A great service by vaseyandco · · Score: 3, Informative

    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!!!
  6. Is anything getting lost here? by ear1grey · · 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 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