[Gllug] UK Mirror Service Contract Announcement

[Sarah Ewen]

fyi - Forwarded from Aberdeen LUG. I love mirror.ac.uk :(
---

Crying shame.

I assume everybody here uses the mirror.ac.uk site every now and then.

Will have to update my Debian sources.list file... was surprised to
discover they mirror over 100Gb of debian files on their servers.

Mark.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 6 Apr 2004 12:00:09 +0100
From: "Moore, Claire" <c.l.moore at LANCASTER.AC.UK>
To: MIRROR-USERS at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: [MIRROR-USERS] UK Mirror Service Contract Announcement

Dear Users

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. From 1st August a new
contractor will be funded by the JISC to provide an internet resources
mirroring service for further and higher education. The JISC (see
http://www.jisc.ac.uk) will no doubt make an announcement regarding a new
service provider in due course.

The Universities of Lancaster and Kent have always strongly believed in
providing a fully resilient and well supported mirroring service.
Unfortunately, our plans for the future, which included continuing with
this high level of service in addition to providing a fully customisable
interface to personalised favourite mirrors, as well as a choice of RSS
news feeds, were considered too expensive by the JISC.

We have not entirely given up hope of continuing to run a mirroring
service, 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. Please inform us if you are aware of any such opportunities!

The UK Mirror Service will still be available for use until July 31st
2004. We are, however, in the process of informing source sites of the end
of contract and will, at their request, discontinue and delete mirrors
prior to this date. As such, some mirrors may become unavailable before
the end of July. Where this is the case, announcements will be made on the
service web site.

We would like to thank you all for the incredible support, excellent
suggestions, and useful comments, which you have provided over the past
years, from the early days of HENSA (the Higher Education National
Software Archive), through the beginnings of the current UK Mirror Service
in 1999 to the present day, over which time the service has grown
enormously both in terms of the archive size and even more so in terms of
usage. We have enjoyed providing and developing the service for you, and
wish the new providers success in developing and running a new mirroring
service for further and higher education.

Best wishes
The UK Mirror Service Team


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----- End forwarded message -----
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