If you need to quickly find the fastest Archive mirror to download Debian packages, you can either use apt-spy as shown here or use a tool called netselect-apt.
netselect-apt can be installed with apt-get:
# apt-get install netselect-apt Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following extra packages will be installed: netselect The following NEW packages will be installed: netselect netselect-apt 0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 37.9 kB of archives. After this operation, 171 kB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Get:1 http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ squeeze/main netselect amd64 0.3.ds1-14+squeeze1 [25.8 kB] Get:2 http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ squeeze/main netselect-apt all 0.3.ds1-14+squeeze1 [12.0 kB] Fetched 37.9 kB in 0s (201 kB/s) Preconfiguring packages ... Selecting previously deselected package netselect. (Reading database ... 106538 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking netselect (from .../netselect_0.3.ds1-14+squeeze1_amd64.deb) ... Selecting previously deselected package netselect-apt. Unpacking netselect-apt (from .../netselect-apt_0.3.ds1-14+squeeze1_all.deb) ... Processing triggers for man-db ... Setting up netselect (0.3.ds1-14+squeeze1) ... Setting up netselect-apt (0.3.ds1-14+squeeze1) ...
You can then start it with the distribution (e.g. stable, testing, unstable, lenny, squeeze…) as parameter:
# netselect-apt stable Using distribution stable. Retrieving the list of mirrors from www.debian.org... --2012-12-25 21:20:46-- http://www.debian.org/mirror/mirrors_full Resolving www.debian.org... 86.59.118.148, 2001:858:2:2:214:22ff:fe0d:7717 Connecting to www.debian.org|86.59.118.148|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 337765 (330K) [text/html] Saving to: “/tmp/netselect-apt.UJfxkZ” 100%[==================================================================================================================================================================>;] 337,765 1.68M/s in 0.2s 2012-12-25 21:20:46 (1.68 MB/s) - “/tmp/netselect-apt.UJfxkZ” saved [337765/337765] Choosing a main Debian mirror using netselect. netselect: 389 (23 active) nameserver request(s)... Duplicate address 212.36.0.70 (http://ftp.bg.debian.org/debian/, http://debian.spnet.net/debian/); keeping only under first name. ... Duplicate address 128.61.240.89 (http://128.61.240.89/debian/, http://debian.gtisc.gatech.edu/debian/); keeping only under first name. Running netselect to choose 1 out of 379 addresses. .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. The fastest server seems to be: http://debian.cruisix.net/debian/ Writing sources.list. Done.
It is much faster than apt-spy and produces a sources.list file in the current directory:
# cat ./sources.list # Debian packages for stable deb http://debian.cruisix.net/debian/ stable main contrib # Uncomment the deb-src line if you want 'apt-get source' # to work with most packages. # deb-src http://debian.cruisix.net/debian/ stable main contrib # Security updates for stable deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib
netselect-apt is faster than apt-spy but supports less option and it is e.g. not so easy to select a region or country.
netselect-apt is also faster because it doesn’t actually benchmark the mirrors but just pings them. So the speed measurements made by netselect-apt are not as accurate as the one done by apt-spy.
Another difference is that netselect-apt automatically gets the latest list of archive mirror. With apt-spy you’d need to first run it with the update option.
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