What is is with all of these Slackware mirror
sites that either don't even have Slackware 8.1
or if they do, the Slackware-8.1-iso directory
is empty!

The only one that I could find that has it was
giving me a download speed of about 2K .. It would
have taken weeks to download at that speed.

There are a lot of nice .. fast .. mirror sites
out there but aren't they being updated? Anyone
know why? .. or why they don't have the iso file?

It it because it is too big?

Probably just haven't added the 8.1 version yet.

Be patient grasshopper
It normally takes 2 to 3 days for all the mirrors to sync with a new slackware release.

Ya, what happens is Peter does a release and puts it up on ftp.slackware.com. This site is fairly slow and has few mirrors. Somebody will be on there by chance, see that he has made a release and they run and tell Slashdot.org or some forum site. WIthin hours slackware.com is swamped and nobody can get more then a few KB/s out of it.

Then the mirrors come around and try to update themselves.... Unfortunetly, they can't get bandwidth either... So everyone has to wait until they can suck out the hundreds of MB's worth of stuff for a new release at a few KB/s.

Anyone else think they should close the server to everyone but mirrors until the mirrors have the software?

I have suffered from the same problems with out of date mirrors and can't get to Slack at all, except the web page. The mirror page may also be out of date becasue some them do not even respond or give an error message about it not being there. Shutting a site down may not be that good of an idea. But perhaps a special location, or access rights (group mirror), for the new ISO releases and the mirrors could read it there before the rest of us could even see it. That would allow them to announce it formally. It would also allow them the last chance to correct anything if required before release. Like this time there are two releases, a day apart. Somebody could still stumble across it on the mirror site though unless the permissions were also copied.

I think part of the problem is also that many sites mirror other mirrors
instead of the main site. Some of these "mirrors" have bad/incomplete
copies and the errors get propagated on.. possibly with additional missing
files.

I finally did get a complete 8.1 copy a few days ago. Now the fun part
is to keep MY copy up to date.

I am not sure exactly how Slackware is "released" .. but if what I think
happened is what happened, in the future, there should be a way for them
to make sure that at least a few of the major mirror sites get the new
release BEFORE the announcement is made to the world that a new release
is out.

This is especially important in cases like this where the main site does
not have sufficient bandwidth to handle the load. Even if you can connect
directly to ftp.slackware.com the download speed were so slow, it was
impractical to really do anything. Dowloading a 650 MB file at 4K bytes/sec
comes to about 45 hours of download time. No way!!

When I finally did get through to a decent mirror, I got the entire ~2 GB in
about 2 hours or so..

It would also help if the list of mirrors at www.slackware.com was more
up to date. Many missing. Many that no longer work.

who the hell is peter?