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View Full Version : Argonne National Lab (ANL) Public Mirror Closed


cpl3043usmc
February 5th, 2015, 04:10 AM
I wasn't sure where to put this, so the General Forum seemed best as it could reach the widest audience:

Public access to the Argonne National Laboratory Software Mirror was closed down as of 1 Feb 2015 (http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/). URL: http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/

All variants of the mirror site are now no longer open to the public, as the link above shows.

So, if you were like me, you need to make some changes to /etc/apt/source.list
oldfred
February 5th, 2015, 03:59 PM
Moved to The Cafe, since not a support request.

They were popular as they had one of the fastest connections to the Internet.
And for me they were local, so even if ping times from updater did not show them as "best" it still was the fastest.
Only once when a new release came out did I see slow times from them.

Really disappointed.
rewyllys
February 6th, 2015, 03:57 AM
The closing strikes me as a decision by politicians who have too little understanding of the concept of serving the public good.
oldfred
February 6th, 2015, 03:18 PM
Both Argonne & Fermi are semi-private, but depend on government grants for just about everything. When the grants start to dry up then they do have to cut back.
tgalati4
February 6th, 2015, 03:32 PM
When a local or city government is short of funding, the first thing they do is shut the library. What percentage of Argonne's total budget was allocated to running their software mirrors?
Matthew_Harrop
February 6th, 2015, 03:42 PM
I apologise for my ignorance here, but what did Argonne host?
oldfred
February 6th, 2015, 03:50 PM
Many Linux mirrors, not just all of Ubuntu. I always changed to them rather than the default USA one. It was fast.

It you went to the mirror it also had many other Linux distributions also.

If you go into synaptic, software center or when downloading updates you can test/reconfigure for "best" server. But it relies on ping times and some servers have faster/higher capacity connections and may be better if nearby, even if one ping test is not best.
cpl3043usmc
February 6th, 2015, 04:57 PM
I'm glad that this got some attention. I agree that the loss of the mirrors is a hit to the community, but there are a few others available. I use it for a few 12.04 files now that I'm running 14.04, and the Argonne mirror was the fastest/best source for me, also. I have one program in particular (Stata 12) that depends on some older files.