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 :)

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

Will someone tell the uk government

[pagaman]

www.mirror.ac.uk != www.mirror.co.uk

Re:Well, bugger.

[Tet]

For one thing its just a mirror, all that software is available on hundreds of other sites.

It's not just a mirror. It's a particularly fast and comprehensive mirror. It's always up, and has everything you need. OK, so I don't get the full benefit, but it's still much better than the alternatives, and I still get 3.5MB/s downloads, even without being on JANET. This is not a good day for those in the UK.

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/

funding

[curator_thew]

This sort of funding should come from the people that it's relevant for: i.e. the owners of intercontinential links, or it should be cooperatively funded, say to be co-located at a large interconnect -- as these people wear the costs of non-mirrors.

It's not relevant for the academic community to fund these things: doing so is a historical throwback to when the networks were largely academic, and most of the users were too. That's not how it is now, and personally I'd rather see the money used to support academic concerns, not a service increasingly used by non-academic.

I think if anyone is upset about this: direct complaints to people that should be doing something about it (i.e. exchanges/interconnects, international link providers).