To help reduce the load on Central and provide faster downloads of the index (updated weekly), we are redirecting the requests over to Amazon S3. For most users this will be completely transparent except you should notice both the indexes and general Central use to be much faster. If however you have a firewall that limits connections to the central repo ip, you may need to adjust your rules to allow the S3 IP numbers [1].
The S3 usage right now is a trial to see how it performs, please reply with any feedback and note that we may undo the rewrites if any problems are detected. This means you should continue to use the repo1.maven.org/.index/ urls to retrieve the index. [1] http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?messageID=827 57
