Why mirror.ac.za went dark
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.
However, several people attempting to access the mirror in recent weeks have received an HTTP 410 response from the server (the status code for “Gone”), with a decommission notice.
MyBroadband asked TENET what led to the mirror being decommissioned and received feedback from Guy Halse, the organisation’s executive officer for trust and identity.
“The short answer is that we no longer have a mandate to continue. To properly explain that, we need a bit of history and an explanation of how TENET works,” said Halse.
“TENET is a non-profit company that was set up specifically for the benefit of South African (public) universities and associated research institutions.”
That is the community TENET serves, which funds it, and to which it is ultimately accountable. TENET serves at the behest of the universities, and that’s where it gets its mandate.
“The mirror service was created in about 2012, at a time of relative bandwidth scarcity and complex interconnection requirements,” said Halse.
“At the time, the motivation for creating it revolved around bandwidth and peering arrangements.”
Importantly, as a community-led organisation, the service was governed by an advisory group drawn from TENET’s client institutions, which made decisions about projects that should be mirrored and why.
“One of the decisions at the time was that the service should be generally accessible and, wherever possible, we should be an official mirror for any project we hosted,” said Halse.
“That led to users of the service well beyond the community that TENET itself actually serves.”
Fast forward thirteen years, and South Africa has a lot more bandwidth. Additionally, there are more submarine cables, resulting in a more reliable Internet in general.
“Over the last few years, we’ve seen substantial changes in the usage patterns of the mirror service,” Halse explained.
“For many of the projects we mirror, we had reached the point where the bandwidth expended in maintaining a mirror exceeded that of the clients.”
In other words, rather than saving bandwidth, which was the original justification for it, the service now had a net cost.
Enough bandwidth, not enough SA traffic
Halse said that local traffic on many of the mirrors had dropped off significantly in recent years. The five-minute average of client traffic just before decommissioning was less than 100Mbps.
“The server has multiple 10Gbps links and used to average gigabits per second of client traffic,” he said.
“Where mirrors were seeing significant client traffic, the majority of that was not from our own community or even South Africa.”
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.
Macports was more popular in Brazil, CPAN was used in Singapore and France, and Raspbian was used in Cameroon and the Netherlands more than in South Africa.
On the FreeBSD mirror, users from Brazil generated the most traffic, while traffic from South Africa was the 16th highest.
“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.”
Hardware and operating system reached end-of-life
When the hardware and operating system reached end-of-life and TENET needed to spend money on replacing them, it began to consider whether the service was still adding value.
Crucially, it also evaluated whether the time and resources would be better spent on other projects. However, the final decision was only made after consulting TENET’s client institutions.
“We didn’t arbitrarily decide to shut the service down — we asked the community that pays our bills for input. However, that call was met with deafening silence,” said Halse.
“Indeed, all the queries we’ve received about shutting it down have come from outside the community that funds us.”
Perhaps most tellingly, the last active member of the advisory group responsible for the service left in 2017, and several subsequent attempts to revive it have failed.
“What all of this means is we don’t have a mandate from the institutions we serve to expend further resources on this,” said Halse.
He said that they understand arguments about digital sovereignty and African hosting of international projects, but as a small non-profit, TENET must also be pragmatic.
“What we’re doing now is redirecting the resources we might have expended on this into digital sovereignty exercises that directly impact higher education,” said Halse.
Specifically, TENET is channelling resources into exercises surrounding the FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse) and safeguarding South African research output.
“That’s far more directly aligned with the mission of a national research and education network than running a mirror service.”
End of Line
Mirror.ac.za was officially decommissioned on 10 September 2025. However, Halse said that in reality, it was shut down a bit after that.
“Well before the planned decommissioning date, we tried to make contact with every project for which we were listed as an official mirror and requested that they remove us from their mirror list,” he said.
TENET only decommissioned after it received confirmation from a project. However, some projects confirmed they would remove the mirror by the end date, but haven’t actually cleaned up properly.
“It’s for that reason that we’ve created placeholder websites for every single decommissioned mirror,” explained Halse.
“We deliberately return an HTTP 410 Gone response so that search engines and other crawlers will de-list the page, and end users will receive a valid error response.”
In most cases, the error message will refer you to the project’s official mirror list. “Where we know of viable local alternatives, we’ve listed those too.”
Loading ...