[UFO Chicago] No more ANL mirror

[Neil R. Ormos]

Matthew T. Gibbs wrote:
> Brian Sobolak <brian at planetshwoop.com> wrote:

>> Went to go get some new bits today and saw that
>> the ANL mirror has been permanently taken down.
>> What a disappointment.

> Yeah, I saw that too, not too long ago.  I also
> was very disappointed as it was a fast and
> seemingly well-maintained mirror.

I think this was discussed at a meeting, some time
around February, when the mirror, or public access
to it, was removed.

I never found the ANL mirror to be fastest but I
thought it was less likely to be tampered with
than mirrors run by university Linux groups, etc.

It's too bad it's gone, but I guess I'm not all
that surprised.  I always assumed that public
access to the mirror, if not the entire mirror,
was a skunk works, off budget project, whose
existence relied on the willingness of interested
technical personnel to maintain it, and the grace
of the several managers to whom it was visible,
one of which eventually ran out.

Another skunk works project that was useful the
the public, but eventually shut down, was the
Census Bureau's Tiger Mapping Service, which
served maps drawn from the Census TIGER line data.
The service operated in 1995 and was withdrawn in
2010.  Sometime midlife, Census put up an
extremely defensive notice warning that the
service wasn't part of their core mission and that
they might withdraw it at any time, so no one
should build applications that rely on it.  But it
was extremely useful and there were no reasonable
alternatives, so, of course, lots of applications
were built on it anyway.  And there is no suitable
replacement.

--Neil