xen's Debian Tip-of-the-Day (March 5, 2002)
===========================================
I know that there's a number of PLUG readers who use Debian. So I'll be
sharing some Debian tips now and then on some useful little tools in the
packages. Although the bulk of the tips will be Debian oriented, there's a
bit in there that will be applicable to non-Debian distributions as well.
One of the neat tools that I've been using lately to discover the
"fastest" mirrors of a specific service has been 'netselect'. Recently, I
discovered that the netselect package for Debian has something extra. Part
of the Debian netselect package is a neat little tool called
'netselect-apt' which does what the normal 'netselect' tool does and a bit
more, oriented toward finding the fastest Debian mirror from the machine
you run it on.
As an example, I ran 'netselect-apt testing' on bahag-hari and it starts
by retrieving a list of mirrors from www.debian.org. After completing the
list, netselect-apt then starts to perform a netselect on the list of
mirrors. There are about 145 known mirrors to choose from, so this utility
makes the selection process less tedious and will perform tests to find
out which mirror might provide better access from your machine. It does a
bit of testing and finds the best performer from the list. It then reports
which mirrors it has found to provide best performance for both the main
and non-US packages. As a bonus, it writes a sources.list file in your
current working directory, which you can fold into your
/etc/apt/sources.list if you wish to use it.
You can use netselect-apt against stable, unstable, testing, woody,
potato or sid.
If you aren't using Debian, you can still use the netselect tool to find
the "fastest" server from a given list. At the command line, you can
issue:
netselect hostname1 hostname2 hostname3
and netselect will spew out the host which responds the quickest.
Enjoy!
--
___ Eric Pareja (xenos AT upm.edu.ph) | Information Management Service [IMS]
\@/ Network and Systems Administrator | University of the Philippines Manila
v "Even the smallest person can change the course of the future." -Galadriel
_
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