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,