UIS is withdrawing all domain names under csx.cam.ac.uk. As a result, we will need to move the Unix Support Mirror Service off the www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk domain. Before we do, we want to establish whether the service is still of value to the University and invite current and potential future users of the service to answer the survey questions below.
Consultation period
The three week consultation period will run from Thursday 28 April until Friday 20 May.
About the Unix Support Mirror Service
The service maintains copies of the distribution sites for some Linux distributions and a few other pieces of software and makes these available to users within the University.
The service was introduced in the mid-1990s when transatlantic network bandwidth was scarce and expensive, and data rates within the UK were slow. The service provided mirrors of mission-critical sites and code on-site to overcome these limitations and provide resilience if our Internet connection is unavailable.
The service runs on a single virtual machine. This means that in the event of a failure of UIS's VMware infrastructure on one site, the service will be interrupted. The service is also interrupted for several minutes every few weeks for operating system updates.
Service scope
The mirror server can mirror upstream sites either over rsync or over FTP. No current mirrors use HTTP. The contents of the mirror server are made available within the UDN (and in practice outside it as well) over several protocols:
- HTTP and HTTPS (www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk)
- FTP (ftp-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk)
- NFS (nfs-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk)
- Rsync (rsync-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk)
We currently have live mirrors of:
- Internet RFCs
- Internet-Drafts
- The GNU project
- Ubuntu, including Canonical partner repositories
- CentOS
- Debian
- Fedora
- Linux kernel
- OpenSUSE
- Scientific Linux
- OpenSSH
- Cygwin
There are also various archives of obsolete software on the mirror service, including 4.4BSD-Lite and Gnoppix.
Option 1: Move to new names
To avoid future problems, the new names would not be under uis.cam.ac.uk. Changing the domain names for the service would require all clients to be reconfigured to use the new names before 1 September 2022.
Option 2: Withdrawal
Withdrawing the service would mean that users would have to either fetch software directly from sources outside the University or run their own mirrors. This would require all clients to be reconfigured to use other sources by 1 September 2022. If a significant number of people were to run their own mirrors, it would probably be more expensive than doing the job centrally.
Survey questions
- Do you currently use the mirror service?
- Which protocols and mirrors do you use?
- Would you use the service if it moved to a new domain name?
- What would you do instead if the service were withdrawn?
- Do you have any additional comments?
Please send your responses to infra-sas@uis.cam.ac.uk by Friday 20 May.
Publication date: Thursday 28 April 2002