We're a distributed team, which is why our VMs use the Ubuntu mirror://
setup. Our /etc/apt/sources.list
looks like the following:
deb mirror://mirrors.ubuntu.com/mirrors.txt lucid main restricted universe multiverse
deb mirror://mirrors.ubuntu.com/mirrors.txt lucid-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb mirror://mirrors.ubuntu.com/mirrors.txt lucid-backports main restricted universe multiverse
deb mirror://mirrors.ubuntu.com/mirrors.txt lucid-security main restricted universe multiverse
This by itself is pretty amazing and very helpful for people who work in different locations — less local customization, etc. necessary. Fail-over in theory.
In day-to-day, this setup fails too often. I want to say 2-3 times this week.
Right now mirrors.ubuntu.com
returns ftp.uni-bayreuth.de
as my closet mirror. Unfortunately, it seems to be down.
This has been going on for a few hours and the mirror is hosted by volunteers at a university and today being a Friday, my hopes are low that this is getting corrected soon.
All talk, my questions are:
- Does anyone use this?
- How do you work around downtime? (my quick-fix is a shell script)
- How can I help to improve this situation?
mirror:
method which had the most updates in your thread. My problem is that whenever the fastest mirror fails, then there is no failover and I am stuck.