MRAN down again and again and again

[TobiSonne]

MRAN time machine seems to be down again. What ist wrong with you? It's absolutely embarrassing that you can't rely on a Service from Microsoft. I am really angry and appalled. Thank you for nothing!

[GreyMerchant]

I am currently experiencing the same problem at the very moment. I also had some issues in the past 7 days.

[jwarwick-delfi]

Same here. CRAN mirror reports it has been down for days.
https://cran.r-project.org/mirmon_report.html

[jonathon-love]

i think it would be good for MRAN to provide some sort of guidance as to what sort of reliability we should expect. perhaps neively, most of us seem to expect that a reasonably simple mirroring service maintained by a large well resourced company should provide high levels of reliability ... and we've made it a part of our toolchains under this (again, perhaps neive) expectation.

if it's an experimental service that shouldn't be relied on in production, that there isn't really a team responsible for it should it go down (as appears to be the case), then it might be worth being upfront about this.

for people visiting this issue looking for an alternative, there is the rstudio package manager. i.e.

https://packagemanager.rstudio.com/cran/2022-02-16

unfortunately this doesn't seem to mirror the macos or windows binaries, but it at least can provide a source snapshot. i haven't used it extensively, but i haven't experienced any downtime yet.

cheers

[GreyMerchant]

As mentioned above, we really need to know what we can expect from you in terms of reliability of services. To have an outage for 3.4 days would be considered catastrophic by most standards and you couldn't expect any of us to actually rely on it.

[nfplay]

We are also in dire need of an update regarding this issue. We use MRAN in production in one of our projects and the impact is severe. Does anyone know any estimates regarding the fix of this problem, or anyone at all at Microsoft that could look into it?

Thanks

[alexvorobiev]

Given the unpredictable availability of MRAN we are adding RStudio's repositories to our configuration . I would strongly suggest that instead of relying on free services with implied no guarantied uptime, production-critical environments invested either in paid subscriptions (RStudio, Anaconda, etc. - I am not affiliated with either) in order to have support, SLAs, etc. or on-premises snapshots of CRAN made as often as needed.

[jonathon-love]

for anyone waiting for it to come back up again, it appears to be back up again.

i do always wonder if this is because someone at microsoft saw that it was down, and was like "ooh, i'll fix this ... this is the nth time this has happened! i should talk to someone about this!", or if the outages are of a temporary nature and the return to functioning spontaneous, and the folks at microsoft are completely oblivious.

[nfplay]

Yes, looks like it's up again!