Wednesday·24·November·2010
Useful but Unknown Unix Tools: netselect //at 00:05 //by abe
Ever wondered which mirror of your favourite Linux distribution is the fastest at your location?
Check it with netselect (code at GitHub). It checks for the number of hops and ping times to given hosts and tells you which one is the fastest of them:
# netselect -vv ftp.de.debian.org ftp2.de.debian.org \ ftp.ch.debian.org ftp.nl.debian.org ftp.debian.org Running netselect to choose 1 out of 5 addresses. ....................................................... ftp.de.debian.org 25 ms 16 hops 90% ok ( 9/10) [ 72] ftp2.de.debian.org 17 ms 17 hops 90% ok ( 9/10) [ 51] ftp.ch.debian.org 0 ms 3 hops 90% ok ( 9/10) [ 0] ftp.nl.debian.org 22 ms 15 hops 90% ok ( 9/10) [ 62] ftp.debian.org 22 ms 15 hops 90% ok ( 9/10) [ 60] 0 ftp.ch.debian.org
And if you’re too lazy to optimize your sources.list with netselect
manually, just use the netselect-apt package. It will do it
for you.
Tagged as: apenwarr, APT, GitHub, mirrors, netselect, netselect-apt, nuggets, ping, traceroute, UUUT
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Re: Useful but Unknown Unix Tools: netselect
Posted by: Joey Hess Website: http://kitenet.net/~joey/ Time: Mon, 22 Nov 2010 17:36 Yes, it's unfortunate that netselect's description implies that it is useful for finding a fast server for apt, when in fact it is mostly useful for finding a low-latency server for something else.
The original plan seems to have been to extend netselect to use bing-style bandwidth probing. But that never happened.
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Re: Useful but Unknown Unix Tools: netselect
A better way to do that is to use apt-spy since that actually downloads files from the remote server.
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