This is a public service announcement that the.earth.li (the machine that hosts this blog) will cease service as a Debian mirror on 1st February 2019 at the latest.

It has already been removed from the official list of Debian mirrors. Please update your sources.list to point to an alternative sooner rather than later.

The removal has been driven by a number of factors:

  • This mirror was originally setup when I was running Black Cat Networks, and a local mirror was generally useful to us. It’s 11+ years since Black Cat was sold, and 7+ since it moved away from that network.
  • the.earth.li currently lives with Bytemark, who already have an official secondary mirror. It does not add any useful resilience to the mirror network.
  • For a long time I’ve been unable to mirror all release architectures due to disk space limitations; I think such mirrors are of limited usefulness unless located in locations with dubious connectivity to alternative full mirrors.
  • Bytemark have been acquired by IOMart and I’m uncertain as to whether my machine will remain there long term - the acquisition announcement focuses on their cloud service rather than mentioning physical server provision. Disk space requirements are one of my major costs and the Debian mirror makes up ⅔ of my current disk usage. Dropping it will make moving host easier for me, should it prove necessary.

I can’t find an exact record of when I started running a mirror, but it was certainly before April 2005. 13 years doesn’t seem like a bad length of time to have been providing the service. Personally I’ve moved to deb.debian.org but if the network location of the is the reason you chose it then mirror.bytemark.co.uk should be a good option.