Re: Activity on Debian unstable (sid) archives

[Justin Ekis <jekis@isp.com>]

On Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 10:33:22AM -0500, Lorenzo Taylor wrote:
> I wonder if it may be possible that mirrors.kernel.org isn't synchronizing.  I
> am following debian.hands.com and debian.secsup.org and they seem to be updating
> without any problems.

One useful resource I've found is the debian mirror checker. It keeps a 
list of mirrors and how recently they synchronized. There are actually 
two of these. Mirror.debian.org/status.html doesn't seem to track as 
many mirrors. It doesn't list much info on the main page but each one 
has it's own page with details. The other is www.debian.de/dmc/today/ 
which is the one I prefer. It lists more mirrors and shows the time each 
was updated right on the front page.

After checking both lists for a few days I noticed that 
debian.osuosl.org was almost always the very first one on the list. If 
it isn't on top of the list it's second or third. That's the one I'm 
currently using.

It would seem that mirrors.kernel.org hasn't been updated for a week 
which is a little hard to believe. That checks out to be correct though.

Another tip, especially if you're on a dialup connection, install the 
version of apt in experimental. When you do an apt-get update, instead 
of downloading the entire Packages and Sources files it gets small 
patches and applies these to the existing files to make them current. 
This saves a lot of time on a slow link.

HTH,
Justin