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  • Cloudflare service disruption

    From Erik Braun@erik@ctan.org to comp.text.tex on Wed Nov 19 07:14:42 2025
    From Newsgroup: comp.text.tex

    Did you notice the major outage of many large websites yesterday?
    (Cloudflare was offline for some hours)

    CTAN and TeX live remained available for the simple reason that we are independent of monopolists. The CTAN mirror services are supported by
    over 100 volunteers around the world and cannot simply be shut down:

    https://www.ctan.org/mirrors

    I am glad to see that free software also means reliable availability
    in this case. A big THANK YOU to all mirror providers! (And if you
    live in a country that is not yet connected, please register as
    mirror. It's not difficult.)


    Thanks again
    Erik

    --- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2
  • From Annada Behera@annada@tilde.green to comp.text.tex on Tue Nov 25 13:17:11 2025
    From Newsgroup: comp.text.tex

    Hi Erik,
    Do you know how I can default to a given mirror on the web?
    Say that I click on the following link:
    https://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/rpgicons/rpgicons-doc.pdf
    It takes me to this website.
    https://2.mirrors.in.sahilister.net/ctan/macros/latex/contrib/rpgicons/rpgicons-doc.pdf
    But the funny thing is that my own institute runs a mirror.
    https://mirror.niser.ac.in/ctan/macros/latex/contrib/rpgicons/rpgicons-doc.pdf
    The server is house literally down the stairs in the
    datacenter I walk by on my way to office everyday. Here is
    the ping statistics:
    [void:~] ping -c 20 -q 2.mirrors.in.sahilister.net
    PING 2.mirrors.in.sahilister.net (82.180.146.159) 56(84) bytes of data.
    --- 2.mirrors.in.sahilister.net ping statistics ---
    20 packets transmitted, 20 received, 0% packet loss, time 19003ms
    rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 48.379/91.480/176.565/33.490 ms
    [void:~] ping -c 20 -q mirror.niser.ac.in
    PING mirror.niser.ac.in (10.10.0.36) 56(84) bytes of data.
    --- mirror.niser.ac.in ping statistics ---
    20 packets transmitted, 20 received, 0% packet loss, time 19422ms
    rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.483/0.534/0.558/0.020 ms
    I am being redirected halfway through India to a mirror in
    Mumbai with an average 90+ ms latency when a submilisecond
    0.534 mirror is in the same building that my office is in.
    This is very frustrating. My Institute's mirror is also
    officialy listed at https://ctan.org/mirrors
    Do you know how I can fix this issue?
    Annada
    -----Original Message-----
    From: Erik Braun <erik@ctan.org>
    Subject: Cloudflare service disruption
    Date: 11/19/2025 12:44:42 PM
    Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
    Did you notice the major outage of many large websites yesterday?
    (Cloudflare was offline for some hours)
    CTAN and TeX live remained available for the simple reason that we are independent of monopolists. The CTAN mirror services are supported by
    over 100 volunteers around the world and cannot simply be shut down:
    -a https://www.ctan.org/mirrors
    I am glad to see that free software also means reliable availability
    in this case. A big THANK YOU to all mirror providers! (And if you
    live in a country that is not yet connected, please register as
    mirror. It's not difficult.)
    Thanks again
    Erik
    --- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2