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

Misleading post?

[Sits]

My understanding is that the *Universities of Kent and Lancaster* are no longer providing a mirroring service. There will be some sort of mirroring service provided to JANET users by a different third party. I think there was a tendering process and JANET decided to go with someone else this year.

However, I'm not sure that it's clear whether the new mirror will:

• Carry all the mirrors the old mirror.ac.uk service did
• Provide the variety of protocols the old mirror did (http/ftp/rsync)
• Will be accessible to non JANET connections

The last point is the real sticking issue. Can anyone else clarify things? Either way mirror.ac.uk (as it is currently) will be sorely missed. It's provided an extremely useful service over the years and I'm sure it's saved Swansea Uni a lot of transatlantic traffic over the years :)

It seems only fair to me

[fr0dicus]

Much of the software hosted here is now big business, where in the past it was of purely academic/enthusiast interest. Linux in particular (I bet linux .iso and kernel source downloads make up a fair percentage of their bandwidth) is now firmly established and on companies' roadmaps. Why should University budgets foot the bill for distributing Red Hat/Mandrake/SuSE's software? A local mirror for student access only would seem more appropriate, with mirror.ac.uk providing mirrors of new and highly active projects.

Re:It seems only fair to me

[Donny Smith]

>My university pays quite a lot for transatlantic bandwidth

Really? I thought most universities don't pay such charges. For example the place where I'm from has country-wide academic network that's connected to major ISPs via peering agreements so it doesn't have to pay any traffic charges.

Re:It seems only fair to me

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually UK universities no longer pay directly for transatlantic bandwidth. A couple of years ago (maybe more now) an executive decision was made to stop charging in proportion to bandwidth used. Instead a flat fee is administered to cover all the long-distance usage.

Usage levels are still monitored, and I found an administrative error in that data which, had the old charging metric been in place, could have led to a serious financial screw-up. That's why I know the charging isn't used any more, they mentioned it in their reply when I reported the error. [FWIW the error was due to MS Excel's unexpected behaviour with certain inputs, and I found it because Gnumeric reports the discrepancy]

Don't imagine for a minute that University's are not paying at all though. They're just no longer paying on a per-byte basis. If the absence of mirror.ac.uk results in increased contention for outbound links, JISC will have to obtain more funding to pay for bigger links, or universities will experience reduced quality of service. Neither of these is good, right?

Find a use for mydoom-infected machines?

[CdBee]

If one were particularly unethical, one might use the remote exploits in unpatched, infected Windows machines to install FTP servers and make a distributed download network for mirroring opensource software

It'd be illegal but it has a certain karmic appeal.

Re:Find a use for mydoom-infected machines?

[evilviper]

You don't want an FTP server. You need something at-least Gnutella-like.

If you have a million FTP servers, all sharing the same files, even if somebody wants the files, they aren't going to be able to scan every FTP server on every IP address.

If you use a Gnutella-style system, each node could have a different set of files, and it would be quite easy to find them. It wouldn't be illegial for somebody to have file downloadable via a Gnutella URN, but listing compromized hosts would show that the owners of a website have some extra knowledge of the worm, that they shouldn't have unless they are involved.

Freecache, Mirror services

[tronicum]

I wonder why mirror business seems to be such a big problem. All the university mirrors and they seem to competiting about having mirros. What about a dedicated cluster from a group of universities in each network? Or something like a proxy group.

Beside the universities large IP network operators should have mirrors at least for their own customers as this would reduce their bandwith.

See also at the /. article about freecache, an project from archive.org

Re:Well, bugger.

[Anonymous Coward]

Strange though, I'd have thought at the end of the day this is just going to cost JANET more as they're now going to have to pay someone external for the bandwidth for all those linux isos the students leech.

Er, someone else bid lower to run the mirroring service and that's going to cost JANET more money. How do you figure that out?

That, unfortunately, is life in public tenders. You might personally be comfortable sticking with an existing supplier, with a good track record, but that doesn't cut it when you're spending taxpayer's money.

Re:Well, bugger.

[pajs]

It may be cheaper on the face of it. But what details do you know of the new service? The old one had 3 sites, lancaster, kent and reading. The new service could be based at a single place, and that would mean more real downtime due to the reduced redundancy.

Also, a cheaper service may (and certainlly initially probably can't) mirror such a comprehensive list of software. That means people will stop using the new service, and download elsewhere.

If people on the JANET stop using the mirror service provided on its network, and use external mirrors, that meants more bandwidth needs to be found. Thus, costs more. (And they used to charge uni's until recently a price per mb for everything across the transatlantic link)

Re:Well, bugger.

[SamBC]

Here, here.

Until very recently, I worked at mirror.ac.uk part-time (I'm even still on staff page, if you know where to find it).

I don't think many people realise how much effort has gone into developing and improving the mirror service. The service has always been a love of much of the staff, and we're all sad to see it go (and not just because it's costing us jobs). Like any lover, it's been a painful journey - intractible hardware, elusive bugs, the JANET core network doing strange things - but it's all be fun.

Most of my work was stuff you didn't see - helping work on backend stability, hardware maintenance, the indexer for the search engine (yes, blame me, but the engine itself was someone else's), and reporting data to the funders.

Another often-overlooked point is the fact that we are so much more than a mirror service - a customised and effective search engine, a browsing interface that lets you look inside many archive and package formats (including RPMs and DEBs), and e even offer users support and assistance.

So I for one will be sad to see it go, and will hold a wake on the day of shutdown (I'll be inviting my former workmates).

Sam