David Wright wrote: > I noticed that on repeating the former, I got a very different file, > and this might be because ftp.us.debian.org had resolved to a different > IPv4 address (but IPv6 was the same). $ host ftp.us.debian.org ftp.us.debian.org has address 128.61.240.89 ftp.us.debian.org has address 64.50.233.100 ftp.us.debian.org has IPv6 address 2610:148:1f10:3::89 It is at this moment a list of two different IPv4 addresses and one IPv6 address. Looking up those will find that debian.gtisc.gatech.edu has both IPv4 and IPv6 available. ftp-nyc.osuosl.org only shows the IPv4 address. So basically two mirror sites are available. Depending upon various things you will somewhat randomly get one or the other site. After having gotten one site it will be sticky for the dns time to live value after which it will expire and the selection process will repeat. > The appearance of the webpage had also changed since yesterday, with > logos from Oregon State University, Open Source Lab, TDS and Friend of > OSL scattered around that weren't there before. Basically the difference is: http://64.50.233.100/debian/ http://128.61.240.89/debian/ When the program looks up the ftp.us.debian.org name it will get all three of the above in some order. If your system is IPv6 capable it will prefer the IPv6 address and always use it. If not then it will select one of the two IPv4 addresses and use it. The different mirror sites are using different software. Some sites advertise their own information and others do not. The archive data provided is the same in either case. And regardless the Release file is cryptographically signed and checksumed such that it can be trusted regardless of the host transporting it. We appreciate the mirrors making their bandwidth and hosting available for Debian mirrors. Bob
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