My ISP runs a Debian Mirror, however it is sometimes not completly up to date for all updates on amd64. However, it is much faster to use my ISP's mirror (mirror.eftel.com) rather than the local official debian mirror (ftp.wa.au.debian.org), and traffic from my ISP's mirror is free.

Is it possible to set up apt so that it will first check my ISP's mirror, and if the package is there then download it from there, otherwise go to the official mirror? This way, if the package is on the ISP mirror then I can get it fast, but if not I can at least get it.

My sources.list file is:
As you can see, I use Debian SID.

At the moment, all package downloads come from the official mirror even though there is a copy on the ISP mirror.

Does anyone have any ideas?
Thanks in advance
--Ian

that may be due to package versions, as you said your local mirror isn't always up to date. You can check that theory by using apt-cache policy.

apt-cache policy <packagename>

That should return what version of the package is installed and what versions are available on the different mirrors.


You can use apt pinning to set priorities on the repositories..

A partial fix for this is to pin each source at a different priority. Eg,
reference: http://www.argon.org/~roderick/apt-pinning.html

Thanks. I will give this a go later today after work.

I will also be slapping the sys admin at EFTel around the ears to get his mirror up to date

--Ian