mirror.ac.za outdated?

MyWorld

Executive Member
Joined
Mar 24, 2004
Messages
5,001
I see that on my Arch Linux the server is outdated by almost a week now, any other people experiencing this?

Is this related to the Telkom mess atm or can I nudge someone to take a look at it?
:D
 
Joined
Feb 2, 2010
Messages
11
I have a problem with the local arch repos like once a month when i do a Syu , packages that are in the repo DB arnt in the repo and all of that its rather annoying , i normaly just switch over to a official mirror and switch back at a latter stage
#Server = ftp://ftp.leg.uct.ac.za/pub/linux/arch/$repo/os/x86_64 << is the worst
 

MyWorld

Executive Member
Joined
Mar 24, 2004
Messages
5,001
I'm on testing arch so I cannot use any of the other mirrors in SA since only mirrors.ac.za are the only local server that has testing. I'm burning to get this resolved since KDE 4.4 hit testing this Monday and I'm still waiting for the local servers to catch up.
:(
 
Joined
Feb 2, 2010
Messages
11
Hehe i was testing for awhile but i ran into some readline issue awhile ago desided to play it safe :p , i dont use kde so i didnt know about that :p , but i thought it had its own repo like kde-unstable or somthing
 

fskmh

Expert Member
Joined
Feb 23, 2007
Messages
1,184
I mirror the Ubuntu repos from mirror.ac.za and I've noticed this on occasion too. I usually just switch to another mirror like ftp.is.co.za for a few days while they catch up. Looks like ftp.is.co.za also has the arch testing repo BTW.

I think the synchronisation status message on www.mirror.ac.za isn't much to go by either, cos it probably just means the script ran, not necessarily that it ran to completion.
 

adrianx

Expert Member
Joined
Jun 30, 2008
Messages
3,761
I'm new to Arch and still a bit confused. No wonder I have not been able to update!

Anyway, with my 384kbps connection, I have never really noticed a difference in speed between a mirror in NZ and one in ZA. Whether it comes from Helsinki or Pretoria, it usually comes at max 39K/s (if I'm lucky).

I think I'll stick with the overseas mirrors until I get one of those "local is cheaper" packages. When/if that happens, I'll just have to make peace with the fact that I will often have to be a bit "behind"... :D
 

DrJohnZoidberg

Honorary Master
Joined
Jul 24, 2006
Messages
23,995
I think I'll stick with the overseas mirrors until I get one of those "local is cheaper" packages.

I love my international / local split in Ubuntu. Saving me a lot on bandwidth as all my updates are local as well as about 90% of YouTube's streaming. If you have access to your router, set it up using bridged mode and dial in with PPPOE - there is a very detailed post somewhere on the forums to get the traffic split working. Once its setup you don't have to change anything, my connections are super stable - even been resetting my router a lot (waiting for 4MB upgrade) and it just picks up where it left off.
 

milomak

Honorary Master
Joined
May 23, 2007
Messages
12,571
Have been happily updating from mirror.ac.za. Changed to a UK mirror and found out I have 800MB worth of updates :eek:
 

froot

Honorary Master
Joined
Jun 2, 2009
Messages
11,347
Yeah mirror.ac.za has been somewhat of a letdown the last few months. At one stage their ftp didn't work anymore... I had to use http instead.
 

milomak

Honorary Master
Joined
May 23, 2007
Messages
12,571
Yeah mirror.ac.za has been somewhat of a letdown the last few months. At one stage their ftp didn't work anymore... I had to use http instead.

i actually almost always use http links (both local and international). my experience is that the download speeds are faster
 

AndrewAlston

Group Head of IP Strategy – Liquid Telecommunicati
Joined
Dec 21, 2005
Messages
302
Hi All,

Ok first of all, I'm not going to make any excuses here, and will openly admit that mirror.ac.za has slipped up a coupla times in the last few months. A lot of this was due to a MAJOR system failure a few months back that we never totally recovered from (in which we lost almost 8 terabytes of data)

However, its not acceptable that a service as public and as utilized as this one has slipped and hence we are taking some proactive steps to resolve this issue.

Firstly, we have brought in a third person (He uses the nick Ambo on here) to help admin the system, and we are confident more human capacity will help reduce system problems in the future and allow us to respond to issues faster.

Secondly, to avoid another major system failure, the largest of the arrays has been configured to raid-6 with hot spare, from the old raid-5 config. This gives us additional disk redundancy.

Thirdly, we are looking at bringing in another front end system to front the backend disk systems, to ensure that on front end system failure there is redundancy there. We are also looking at bringing in another 3 SAN's which will be migrated from another setup we used to run and these will run in a form of software raid across the SAN's, again, protecting us from system failures.

Fourth, we are currently reviewing every sync script and going through all the sync logs to see if we can see if there are any major synchronization problems and modify the uplink sources as needed. I've also asked Ambo to improve the systems functionality that alerts us on synchronization failures so we pick these up faster.

Lastly, on the specific issues mentioned. I've rectified the FreeBSD problems and the arch linux issues that were seen are currently being rectified by a resynch that is running as we speak.

If you guys do have problems with the mirror.ac.za service though, please, do not hesitate to drop me or ambo a note and we will take a look at rectifying the problem as fast as possible.
 

MyWorld

Executive Member
Joined
Mar 24, 2004
Messages
5,001
Thank you for that reply, you have mayor respect from my side!

I will give the mirror a go later tonight and see how it goes, but a huge thank you so far!
:D
 

Tinuva

The Magician
Joined
Feb 10, 2005
Messages
12,474
Downloading my 822mbyte worth of updates now from mirror.ac.za, looks pretty good again.
 

MyWorld

Executive Member
Joined
Mar 24, 2004
Messages
5,001
Just a quick shout out to AndrewAlston, thanks for taking the trouble in fixing the issues we had and for the great service, it has been running very well so far!
 

fullung

New Member
Joined
Mar 19, 2010
Messages
2
Fedora mirror still outdated

Just a quick shout out to AndrewAlston, thanks for taking the trouble in fixing the issues we had and for the great service, it has been running very well so far!

Hello

I'm still having problems with the Fedora mirror at mirror.ac.za, which hasn't been synced since 7 February. I sent an email to admin@mirror.ac.za, but no word yet.

Can anybody help?

Cheers

Albert
 

fullung

New Member
Joined
Mar 19, 2010
Messages
2
Thanks for the advice. Eh.

It seems mirror.ac.za doesn't like email from Gmail...

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification
THIS IS A WARNING MESSAGE ONLY.
YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE.
Delivery to the following recipient has been delayed:
admin@mirror.ac.za
Message will be retried for 2 more day(s)
Technical details of temporary failure:
The recipient server did not accept our requests to connect. Learn more at http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=7720
[196.21.99.1.mirror.ac.za. (10): Destination address required]
 
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