Mirror.ac.uk to Scale Back Operations

KingDaveRa writes "It would seem that the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (www.jisc.ac.uk) have decided to withdraw funding from the www.mirror.ac.uk service. They still want to run a service, but '...perhaps on a smaller scale, and limited to the most popular mirrors. This would, however, depend upon securing sponsorship or alternative funding very quickly, and the approval of our host institutions.' This could turn out to be quite an inconvenience for the UK, as the mirror.ac.uk service has proven itself very fast and reliable."

Comments

Dupe

[avij]

Dupe ...

Email address

[elvum]

If you want to register your disapproval, try their "general enquiries" email address: info@jisc.ac.uk.

Sad news

[orbitalia]

I used to go to Lancaster Uni where the physical mirror was located and knew some of the guys involved in it when it was known as hensa). It was a valuable service back then in the early internet days and still is, fantastic bandwidth, and a well structured archive of only decent software, no fluff, it was alot more than just a mirror. I can't really understand how they are going to save money or resources this way either, as someone pointed out all its going to do is put pressure on the SuperJanet interconnects.

Re:Was this..

[Maddog Batty]

Oh I do hope so. He needs as much stick as possible at the moment. To my knowledge he still hasn't admitted he is at fault.

For those outside the UK, you may want to take a look at the front page of todays Mirror

Re:It seems only fair to me

[TheRaven64]

How about because it saves them money? My university pays quite a lot for transatlantic bandwidth, but it does not pay anything (beyond the flat rate connection charge) for bandwidth between sites on JANET. If I download the latest release of Fedora (for example) that's 2GB (or more if I get the source CDs as well) which either comes from mirror.ac.uk (at 2MB/s) or from an external source. If it comes from mirror.ac.uk, they don't pay for it. If it comes from anywhere else, they do.

sunsite.org.uk

[TarpaKungs]

You could do worse...

Now a new server (as of this year) with kind thanks to [well earned plugs]:

Sun Microsystems - hardware
Thus (Demon) - Network feed
Veritas - Software
Brocade - Hardware
for their contunuing sponsorship.

and of course, the Department of Computing, Imperial College London for
housing and feeding it.

Currently it has 1.8 TB of publicly accessible mirrors and supports the following access mechanisms:

http://www.sunsite.org.uk/ [See here for full details]
ftp://ftp.sunsite.org.uk/
rsync://rsync .sunsite.org.uk/

JISC has announced the replacement provider

[fdobbie]

JISC announced on the 17th April that they have awarded the contract to Eduserv.

The most interesting bit of the blurb is:

From an end user perspective, the most significant change to the service will be that it will only offer freely available technical software resources. Scholarly and Academic resources will no longer be mirrored. It is expected that the current portfolio of technical resources will continue to be mirrored and that any inconvenience to users during the changeover of service will be kept to an absolute minimum.

Having said that, I'm somewhat sceptical awarding the contract based on cost won't lead to a degradation of service. Whatever happened to "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"?