How to select best mirror for slackpkg
 

Hi all

I have a problem with selecting fastest mirror for slackpkg. It seems that nearest mirror is not always the best as Turkey and Greece mirrors doesn't provide good speed and also suffer from occasional disconnecting on my system.

I wonder is there a specific tool for selecting best mirror for slackpkg? something like netselect-apt for debian or mirrorselect for gentoo?

I didn't find anything useful by searching

Ping them?

You can also try using mirrors.slackware.com as your mirror.

You could make a script to grep all the mirrors from the mirrors file and then ping each one of them in a loop while reporting back the results and then use something like sort to have the fastest at the top.

Thanks
I have to read some documents as I am not familiar with ping.
I didn't understand your point. Do you mean adding http://mirrors.slackware.com/ to /etc/slackpkg/mirrors or choosing one of the mirrors from available mirrors section?

Unfortunately I don't have enough time to learn bash scripting. It is in my long to do list though. Anyway, thanks for your instruction.

Yes.

I gave it a try, it kind of works other than that it gets stuck on any unresponsiveness mirror, such as http://mirror.primusdatacentre.com.a...ware64-current.
I'll post it here if anyone has an idea.

Distributions like Arch or Gentoo - who depend heavily on mirror sites - have such a tool (respectively mirrorlist and mirrorselect). Maybe someone should port this to Slackware. Here, it's mainly trial and error. Though I live in South France, I never use the french mirrors because they're quite erratic. After trying out various countries like Austria, Germany and Switzerland, I settled with a mirror in Finland that always seems to work perfectly.

Cheers,

Niki

My understanding is that mirrors.slackware.com is somehow a "meta-mirror" that redirects the download requests using mirrorbrain to handle the traffic and share it between mirrors.

I do not know how load balancing is configured in case of mirrors.slackware.com, but I assume that the mirrors' locations is one of the main parameters to be considered.

For that reason I am not sure that travis82's issue can be solved setting it in /etc/slackpkg/mirrors, But that's certainly worth trying.

@Hosein: could you please try it if not already done, see if that makes a difference and report here?

Also, if Robby Workman reads this thread, I hope he will shed some light.

I did look at the code for mirrorselect after the post by Bertman123 in the MLED forum. The basic version does little else then feeding a mirrorlist to netselect, which is made overly complex by all the bells and wishles common to Gentoo.

So for Slackware it is probably a lot easier than it sounds with the mirrorlist being a plain text-file already, first step would be to get netselect working and then it is a matter of output parsing as the best server is the one on the last line of the netselect output.

edit) first link to netselect doesn't give the source, it is on github. See: https://github.com/apenwarr/netselect

I tested mirrors.slackware.com. According to slackpkg/mirror it finds a nearby mirror. The odd thing is that it selected http://hkg.mirror.rackspace.com/slackware/ in Hong Kong as nearest mirror (perhaps I am living in China, I don't know). Anyway, my experience with hk mirror is horrible.
I guess I have to check all available slackware mirrors by ping.

This will get you a list of mirrors and the speed it takes to wget their index.html which could narrow down a fast mirror, I haven't figured out how to sort the output well yet... Don't forget to pass SLVER=14.1 if you aren't using current or just edit the SLKVER line in the script.

Another solution with ping. This is a draft, of course.

Only mirrors with 0 packet loss are listed.

Results can vary upon time needed for name resolution. Use a good name server.

Sort criteria: minimum response time, fastest at the bottom to avoid scrolling.
EDIT. Sorry for the BREs harder to read, but the POSIX specification only mandates that a compliant sed supports this kind, although it could be hard to find an implementation that does not support EREs in addition.

Thank you both. I will test them tonight.

@Didier
What do you mean by "use a good name server"?

To ping or access a server (a mirror, in this case), we need to have its domain name translated to the corresponding IP address.

For that we query one of the name servers whose IP addresses are listed in /etc/resolv.conf.

But, if that name server is slow to respond for any reason, this will delay access to the mirror.

Even worse, if the name server is buggy or its cache not updated, this can make the mirror unreachable, unless you know its IP address and use it instead of the domain name.

I have sometimes used Google's public DNS addresses 8.8.8.8 and 4.4.4.4 as they are reliable.

For that you can just write your /etc/resolv.conf like this:Then to avoid that some program change these IP do this:Caveat: of course Google will know all the websites you visit. But probably they already do, so...

I tested theses scripts. Here is the output of orbea's script (I omitted outputs for current mirrors):

Here is the result of Didier's one:

According to these output the best mirror for my connection is ftp.gwdg.de in Germany (correct me if I am wrong). I uncomment it in slackpkg mirrors file and it works fine (at least at the moment). I didn't touch /etc/resolve.conf though.

Should I change it?