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Anyone want a utility to find the best mirror?



Some time ago, I asked about any utility that could take a list of machines
and find the one that's closest, so that I could find the best mirror to
point dselect to. Someone responded that I should try "netselect", which did
help a lot. However, netselect has a couple of shortcomings:

  o It only tests ping times, not actual transfer rates of data
  o It doesn't check to see if there's an ftp server there.
  o It doesn't check to see if the ftp server accepts anonymous login
  o It doesn't check to see if the ftp server even *still* mirrors the
debian tree

These last two are a real pain... especially the last one. Many of the sites
I tried first in the mirrrors list didn't have the debian tree anymore.
Hrmph!

So, anyway.... I broke down and wrote a little perl script which takes a
README.mirrors.txt and tries to connect to each of the mirrors listed. It
tries to connect anonymously and tries to navagate to the directory where
the debian tree is supposed to be and then it actually tries to download a
file from the site to see what kind of transfer rate it gets.

It does *not* check for *currency* of the mirror. In other words, if the
files in the mirror are all 6 months old, the script will not pick that
up.... yet. I do plan, however, to make it sense that and take that into
account.

Anyway, if anybody wants to give it a whirl, I'm open to some
beta-testing.....

- Joe

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