[clug] Advice request on upgrade to Debian Squeeze - local mirrors?

[Angus Gratton]

Hi Felix,

On Thu, 2011-03-17 at 22:58 +0000, Felix Karpfen wrote:
> My monthly "broadband" quota is modest and the download speeds are 
> throttled when the quota is exceeded.  So I do not think that a full "net 
> upgrade" is viable on my setup.

Who is your ISP? Quite a few ISPs offer unmetered access to a mirror of
Debian packages, so if you configure for their mirror you can download
packages without it counting against your quota.


> I am very grateful for the reference to "deb http://mirror.linux.org.au/
> debian".  I take it that "http" is smart enough to identify and use the 
> closest mirror.

Not really, it will just connect to "mirror.linux.org.au" which is the
primary Debian mirror for Australia. 

It's a probably a sensible choice, but there are lots of others. Scroll
down to "Secondary Mirrors -> Australia" on 
http://www.debian.org/mirror/list

I noticed some ISP's mirrors, such as Internode's, are not official so
not on that list, but the mirrors still exist (at least for common
versions/variants).

AFAIK there is no equivalent to yum's "find the closest mirror to me"
feature.

If you find a Debian mirror that is closer to you (or, better yet,
unmetered for you) then you can edit sources.list to point to it in
particular.

Hth.


- Angus