FTP Servers...

[Jez Hancock]

On Fri, Nov 28, 2003 at 08:23:57PM -0800, Rishi Chopra wrote:
> I've been installing and wiping FreeBSD installations a lot recently, 
> and I've noticed that the FTP servers aren't all that accomodating of 
> installation.
> 
> For example, only 1-in-4 or 1-in-5 installations from ftp.freebsd.org is 
> successful (these are all minimal installations done through FTP, no 
> proxy or other intermediary); despite being on a reliable residential 
> fiber connection, many of my installation attempts seem to fail on 
> installing 'crypto' and 'base' packages.
> 
> What's happening when these installations fail?  Am I being bumped from 
> the FTP servers?  Can anything be done to make installation via FTP more 
> reliable?
It may help to ensure you're using an FTP server with decent latency -
you can test this by pinging the servers - to help with this check the
fbsdmirror.pl script here:

http://www.bsdpro.com/scripts/fbsdmirror.pl

You will need to modify the server list though to include all the servers
you know are relatively close to you - there are only a small number of ftp
servers included in the script by default.  You can find a complete list
of ftp servers here:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mirrors-ftp.html

just add the servers you want included in the ping test to the perl
script.

After that just run the script and wait to find out which servers are
closest to you.

-- 
Jez Hancock
 - System Administrator / PHP Developer

http://munk.nu/