[LUGSB] A fast Ubuntu mirror

[Ilya Sukhanov (dotCOMmie)]

Michael F. Lamb wrote:
> Ubuntu users on campus,
> 
> Based on some unscientific empirical testing, I've found that 
> Northeastern university provides an Ubuntu package mirror that is quite 
> fast compared to many others out there, at least for on-campus users.

Thanks for sharing. There are a bunch of ubuntu users who are going to find this 
useful.

If anyone is interested in preforming tests on which mirror is best for them 
there are 2 nice apps available for debian (and I'm assuming for ubuntu, correct 
me if I am wrong).

My favorite first. netselect uses hop count (traceroute) and percentage of pings 
that get through in order to rank mirrors. Its useful to find any kind of 
mirror, as long you feed it a list of possibilities. netselect-apt is 
specifically made to select apt mirrors, it downloads a list of official debian 
mirrors, ranks them with netselect and creates a sources.list file for you.

Also there is apt-spy which preforms bandwidth test on each mirror in order to 
figure out which is best for you.

Although apt-spy will give you more accurate numbers I recommend you use 
netselect. Its a friendlier approach to selecting mirrors, the tests it preforms 
are a lot less expensive and are pretty accurate. That said netselect will not 
work from campus because ICMP traffic is all blocked on campus.

-- Ilya S.