Fastest Debian Servers

Serve Me!

If your doing a net install of Debian, you need a fast net connection. You also need to use the fastest server to feed your downloads. Particularly if you have a lot of stuff to pull down or a large update you need to run. Fast servers are an absolute must.

Meet netselect-apt. It eliminates the guesswork and its dead easy to use with a few options.

netselect-apt identifies the fastest Debian servers available for download.

netselect-apt pings available Debian servers and compiles a list of the fastest for you to select from. First, we install netselect-apt:

aptitude install netselect-apt

Then get some results:

netselect-apt

It takes a couple of minutes to poll available servers and write a sources.list containing the winners in your current directory.

The available options include:

-n to include non-free
-f to use ftp

You can also stable, testing, unstable, experimental, etch, lenny, woody, sarge, and sid as other options.

netselect-apt -n -f lenny

or

netselect-apt -n -f testing

Run netselect-apt before a major update or upgrade, as you'll notice server speeds change depending on connection speed and workload.