Hi all, A while ago on debian-devel I proposed an algorithm that would allow APT to choose the best possible server for each user from a large list automatically. It could also be used for other tasks, eg. choosing a good SQUID neighbour or IRC server.
So, I wrote a program that gathers the statistics needed for these operations. It's called netselect, and I wrote it all in one night, so please be gentle with the bug reports :) I do want to hear what you think though. Following my signature is the first part of the README. Get it from: http://www.worldvisions.ca/~apenwarr/netselect-0.1.tar.gz It's very experimental. Let me know what happens! Have fun, Avery --------------------------- netselect 0.1 ============= This is netselect, an ultrafast intelligent parallelizing binary-search implementation of "ping." Now stop laughing and pay attention. netselect determines several facts about all of the hosts given on the command line, much faster you would if you manually tried to use ping and traceroute. For example, if I type: netselect -v ftp.fceia.unr.edu.ar ftp.kulnet.kuleuven.ac.be \ ftp.cdrom.com ftp.debian.org ftp.de.debian.org It tells me this: ftp.fceia.unr.edu.ar 422 ms 19 hops 40% ok ( 2/ 5) ftp.kulnet.kuleuven.ac.be 9999 ms 30 hops 0% ok ftp.cdrom.com 215 ms 13 hops 89% ok (17/19) ftp.debian.org 194 ms 20 hops 50% ok ( 3/ 6) ftp.de.debian.org 276 ms 15 hops 66% ok ( 6/ 9) For each host, it figures out the approximate ping time (though not as accurately as "ping" does), the number of network "hops" to reach the target, and the percentage of ping requests that got through successfully. Note that for ftp.kulnet.kuleuven.ac.be in this case, nothing got through at all. That indicates that either the host doesn't exist, or it is down. For a bigger example, I've included the file debian-ftp-mirrors, which is a partially up-to-date list of Debian Linux FTP site mirrors. Try this: netselect -vv $(cat debian-ftp-mirrors) [...etc...] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]