Some site will have the location listed, or some mirrors are hosted educational institutions so you can easily identify the location of those mirrors. However How can I determine the location of an unknown mirror? Like for example, say I want to download a DVD install iso of CentOS. I look a the download mirrors and I see

now from looking at that list how can I tell which one is closest to my location?

There are sites you can find on google that will give you the geolocation of an ip address... although this may not always be accurate.

http://whatismyipaddress.com/staticp....php/lookup-ip

Is a pretty fair one.

Could always whois the ip range at arin or the domain name and see where it's registered too although that isn't necessarily accurate.

Keep in mind, physical proximity does not necessarily indicate faster speeds. I had a site I could have used sneaker net with take 18 hops to and from and manage to get all the way to Texas. I've had sites across the country be 10 hops away and give me a ping time and speeds that made me smile.

If you have a fast connection, pick any one at random that looks like it might be regional and give it a go, if it seems slow after 2-3m pick a different one.

It's really not worth worrying about all that much.

I agree, I don't worry about it too much. I am based in Atlanta, GA and the majority of the time I just get my stuff from the Georgia Tech mirrors. However the few times I do not use the GA Tech mirrors I try to grab one that is fairly close. I think ibilbo is in North Carolina, and I will grab that one if I see it. It would just be nice if there was a quick way of knowing without having to ping the domain to get an IP and then do a whois or do geolocating just to find out which one is closest.

For Fedora I use the yum-fastestmirror plugin that configures yum to give the best service. I presume this would work for CentOS?

Probably, CentOS uses yum.

The fastestmirror plugin works in centos, fedora, etc.

If you're using debian I think the package name is apt-spy.

I have always wondered if some ISP's cache well used downloads just to save them some overhead.

thanks guys, that plugin is nice for using package managers. Now if it only worked for everything else. LOL

There is a firefox add-on called flagfox