Dear All,
Please excuse my choice of email addresses I'm communicating this to, however
the contact page on mandriva.com points to _webforms_. Please forward this as
required (mailing lists/individuals).
For the past three years, Centre for Scientific Computing at Warwick was
providing storage and bandwidth for anorien.csc.warwick.ac.uk to the
Mandr{ake,iva} community, including PLF. In those years, as users of this
distribution, we felt obliged to "give back" to the community, despite the
fact that we were also neglected commercial customer of
Mandrakesoft/Mandriva.
Horrible commercial support (that includes Club!), lack of communication,
constantly degrading quality and countless arguments between the developers,
coupled with complete lack of clear vision of the development model made
Mandriva insignificant in our community.
In Q4 2006 CSC decided to stop endorsing Mandriva and finished phasing out of
all services that still relied on it. We decided to continue to provide the
mirror service for Mandriva/PLF to our (local) users, but advised them to
upgrade to a different distribution ASAP. And so they did.
For your information, in the past 2 years, anorien was #2 ja.net bandwidth
hog, generating 50-90TB outbound traffic per month. We have dedicated 1TB of
ultra-fast, fibre connected SAN storage to the cause.
Today, I have an uneasy task to inform the Mandriva community that we are
pulling the plug on Mandriva/PLF mirrors effective immediately.
People with their own directories will not be affected. We will honour our
commitment to the individual developers as long as CSC plans to provide
mirroring.
Regards,