TENET explains why it decommissioned mirror.ac.za

[Jan]

TENET explains why it decommissioned mirror.ac.za

The Tertiary Education and Research Network of South Africa (TENET) has permanently decommissioned the mirror.ac.za service.

Mirror.ac.za provided high-speed local hosting for many popular free software and open source projects, including the Linux kernel, various Linux distributions, Mozilla Firefox, and OpenOffice.

 

[MikeCTZA]

@Jan small correction is actually mirror.ac.za (without the s) dont think it was ever the plural

 

[Brian_G]

The only mirrors where South African clients dominated were those where TENET was an official mirror behind a load balancer that did proper geolocation.

For all the others, with one exception, African countries never appear among the top users. For example, there were more U.S. and Dutch users of the Alpine, Docker, and Ubuntu cloud & release mirrors than South Africans...

@SauRoNZA @Lupus , maybe the reason I had those weird Ubuntu update server issues a few months back, not an actual MTN issue

“However, as telling as those numbers are, TENET has lots of bandwidth, and bandwidth is not the reason this went away. If it were, we would have shut it down several years ago,” explained Halse.

“Maintaining a large mirror service takes staff time, and it requires hardware, power, and other resources.”