Faithful readers of the CTAN-Ann messages may have noticed the sudden disruption of the service about two and a half weeks ago.
This was not for lack of noteworthy submissions, nor had the CTAN team gone on a collective holiday or on strike. What had in fact befallen us was the -- gradual -- loss of our second main host at Cambridge.
As a matter of fact we had been suspecting for some time that this host was running more or less unattended, but on Thu March 12 it definitely ceased to pick up the packages that had been newly installed or updated on the server in Germany.
In consequence, all the mirrors (http://dante.ctan.org/mirmon/) that had up to then obtained their new material via tex.ac.uk went out of sync.
Still hoping that things might arrange themselves by themselves within a few days, we did not take any immediate action except trying -- in vain -- to reach somebody in charge at Cambridge.
We also stopped sending out CTAN-Ann messages, so that people should not be tempted to go looking for new packages on stale mirrors, and tried to contact mirror admins, asking them to switch from tex.ac.uk to the German server. As one can see on http://dante.ctan.org/mirmon/, these messages still seem not to have reached all the persons concerned, although the situation has improved a little.
Luckily, TeX Live was not affected by this problem, as they are fetching their packages from the server in Germany.
We have now finally given up hope that the Cambridge server will ever re-enter into reliable service again. We have therefore taken the necessary measures to keep up the service on our own.
In particular, we will post in the course of the day the 40 messages kept back during the past weeks and then resume CTAN-Announcements as usual.
Thanks for your patience!
For the CTAN team Petra Rübe-Pugliese