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Lost Mirror


AussieJohn
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Actually I don't disagree with you. My comments are only observations and not criticisms of the university or anyone else. :) :) :)

 

I think you both missed my grin at the "out of step" remark.

 

Cheers. John

Edited by AussieJohn
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Guest CarpeCerevisi
I'll miss that mirror

As will I. Does anyone know of any other mirror within the .ac.uk domain? Since internal JANET traffic is free, that was quite nice from my (within JANET) point of view. Failing that, I guess I'll look into setting up one of my own (though it'll almost certainly have to be restricted to .ac.uk only)

Edited by CarpeCerevisi
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I used to use the anorien mirror. I noticed it stopped working when all the easyurpmi were still pointing to "mandrake" on their server, instead of the "mandriva" directory that it had changed to.

 

That said, I did change it a month or two back and it was working, but sad to see they stopped using it and removed it. Was a nice fast mirror. In fact today, I can't even access anything from their mirror. Can't even browse it over http like you used to.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Guest Jaroslaw Zachwieja

(BIG DISCLAIMER: I REPRESENT OPINIONS OF MY OWN AND MY OWN

ONLY. THEY MUST NOT BE TAKEN AS OPINIONS OF MY EMPLOYER, EITHER

EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED.)

 

(crossposted mandrivausers.org and forums.club.mandriva.com)

 

Hi,

 

I'm the maintainer of anorien.csc.warwick.ac.uk, in a way responsible for

the hard decision of removing the /mirrors/Mandriva from the server.

 

First, I would like to attach here my email to employees of Mandriva:

 

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,

 

Now, before the flamewar commences, please calm down, get a cup of tea and

relax.

 

Still with me? Good.

 

I started my relationship with Mandrake in late July 1998 (anybody here

remembers Gael's post to LWN?). I liked the polished (pun intended) feel

of the system and the fact that at the time it was the only distribution I

could read and type in Polish (I didn't need l18ns, but special characters

support was at premium then -- za?ó?? g??l? ja??!).

 

Although I used to use Slackware, I got hooked on Mandrake. It did what

it said on the tin, and it did it well. It was an improvement to RedHat and

a darn good one. Over the years it became the best, most integrated

desktop on "the market". It was so good, that when in 2003 I started

working for CSC, the decision to use Mandriva on the desktops was a no-

brainer.

 

For the next three years, we've been exclusively using Mandrake/Mandriva

products on our systems. With exception of computational clusters (more

on this later), we had it running on each and every computer. We also

purchased some products from Mandrakesoft and had first time experience

with their support.

 

Somewhere in 2004 we started supplying small services to the Mandrake

development community. We have set up a dedicated build farm for non-

i586 ports (namely an Alpha based ES-40 and a handfull of UltraSparc

systems). Later, some of those sparcs have been shipped to developers

around Europe as hardware donations. We also purchased a dedicated

server and storage for the purpose.

 

More or less at the end of 2005 things went bad. The product support was

atrocious. We have reported serious kernel issues (one regression and two

filesystem stability issues) and tried to get fixes for the automated

installation system. In every case the problem has not been fixed and the

communication with the technical support was somewhat problematic.

 

At the same time, the non-intel ports developers were hitting serious

communication barriers with core in-house people. Despite the

unsupported status of Alpha and Sparc ports, patches to vital system

components were ignored (not rejected!) and stability issues on x86_64,

due to masochistic Cathedral development of the port at Mandriva were

ignored.

 

As a last resort, we tried to approach higher management at Mandriva to

enquire about volume licensing of the enterprise products. I remember

asking about a 2.6 kernel based enterprise system. I was told that it's

going to be out "eventually". Well, as a customer, I was royally hacked

off with this unprofessional approach, to be honest. OK, there was

amusement too. Mandrake Clustering thinggy (I think it was called CLICK).

A (badly designed) point-and-click your computational cluster. We got a

sales call about it once. It was funny. I'm not sure if they still develop it.

 

But we stayed with Mandriva. For one more development cycle. We bought

club access to be able to download fresh ISOs, we purchased boxed

products subscription, crossed our fingers and hoped for the best... Which

didn't come. We even struggled to download the ISOs from club pages.

Go figure.

 

At the end of 2005, serious problems with the distribution started creeping

up. First the XFS/JFS oopses on our 20TB+, Mandriva ran storage.

Something that can't be taken lightly. Especially when some of that data

costs $60k a night to retrieve using a radio telescope array in Argentina

and is impossible to reproduce (it's not a matter of backups, which we had

but the amounts of data from observation runs require reductions which are

lossy, so it's impossible to reproduce it. You can restore the reduced set

but not the original observation data). Something that has been ultimately

solved by upgrading the servers to SUSE.

 

Throughout 2006, it has become clear that Mandriva is no longer a

sustainable solution for our organisation. We've grown beyond expectations

and have discovered the complete lack of scalability of the installdrake.

That, coupled with numerous bugs and bad design forced us to start

looking into direction of a more mature distribution. In the end we've

chosen openSUSE as the desktop and SLES as the server distributions.

 

What all this has to do with Mandriva mirror on Anorien? Some of you

already figured out half of the story. Yes, in the end bandwidth IS money

(even if we don't get an invoice every month) and yes, we have stopped

using Mandriva internally.

 

But there is also a flipside to this. Sort of a personal statement, one I'm

not afraid to make here. Mandriva has gone in a completely corporate-

driven direction and most of all, the execution of the change is appalling.

There are other commercial entities that will SELL you a GNU/Linux

distribution but none of them is so arrogant towards its customers and

developers.

 

This arrogance caused headaches among mirror maintainers too. We had

to shuffle hundreds of gigs of data (and so did our client mirrors off of us)

after recent changes in the mirror structure. Changes that were simply

implemented without giving it much thought to the consequences.

 

Final thoughts? I guess you wouldn't be using GNU/Linux if you weren't

able to draw conclusions yourself. I think I spelled out the most important

bits.

 

The question for Mandriva people is: Can you change? For better that is.

 

Best regards,

--

Jaroslaw Zachwieja

grok@tnt.pl

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Now, before the flamewar commences, please calm down, get a cup of tea and relax.
Don't worry, we were always calm, we were just wondering about the reasons. Sounds like you did tell Mandriva but that doesn't mean we users heard about it :) And I guess the maintainers of the easy-urpmi tools didn't hear about it either, I'm not sure the best way to distribute that kind of information. Is there even a central list of repositories apart from the easy-urpmi ones?

 

One possible way of telling the people concerned would have been to put a readme.txt in the Mandriva directory of the mirror, so that people currently using the mirror would have a way of finding out when they start getting error messages. "Is it a temporary outage, should I just try again later, or has the mirror gone?"

 

Sorry to hear about your experiences, by the way!

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A lot of us experienced the issues you described here Jaroslav. Although I only use Mandriva on a desktop system I had a terrible experience with Mandriva 2006 too. The good news is they are seem to change for the better if we don't count current lay-offs. Mandriva Spring works wonderfully give it a try if you have time.

I encourage everybody who doesn't get response from their customer service to write on the club forum. Your problem won't be ignored there at least.

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True...I would also like to add that Mandriva did not act like a corperation at all, on the contrary... corperations are out to make profit to do this they need your money, since corperations cannot force, unlike governments can and do, you to hand over your money they have to make you give it to them voluntary by giving you a good product/service you desire in return, Mandriva failed in this miserably....

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I encourage everybody who doesn't get response from their customer service to write on the club forum. Your problem won't be ignored there at least.

But why should they? If there is an established and formal channel there, they should expect a response from it with no additional effort, that's how real companies do business!

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Sadly, this note makes perfect sense. I also wish to reiterate the comment about acting like a corporation. In the business world, the customer drives the business. By that I mean that the stuff developed and marketed by any business is tailored toward customer needs. The only company where this does not apply is Microsoft. {smirk intended} I actually expect better of GNU/Linux organizations, who should be changing the tech world in a positive direction, not emulating Microsoft.

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But why should they? If there is an established and formal channel there, they should expect a response from it with no additional effort, that's how real companies do business!

Because emails tend to get lost or just blocked etc. Adam gets all the customer emails or so he wrote, and some just doesn't get through. Not all emails are intentionally ignored.

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dexter11,

 

this has been an ongoing issue for as long as I can remember, too long for excuses. Long before now the question should have been asked, "why can't our customers get in touch with us?" That question should have been asked and dealt with a long time ago, again this is how real companies do business. Let's face the truth, Mandriva (the company) is only supported by fans of the 1998 distro that is now long gone and those that know no better! Nice little niche market there, as long as they can hold on to it.

Edited by Reiver_Fluffi
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