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Making mirror://mirrors.ubuntu.com highly available

rated 0 times [ 4] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 20653 / 2 Years ago, fri, december 24, 2021, 5:16:29

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?

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raldership

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2 Years ago

answered 2 Years ago tersle · Accepted Answer

I appreciate all the input on this question, but since no one came up with a simple solution which fit our circumstances, I decided to fix the problem myself.

I created a tool (specifically for Ubuntu) which I call apt-spy2.

The primary objective of this tool is to find a working mirror fast. Working is defined by that the mirror server is available and (hopefully :) up to date.

I make no assumptions about if the selected server is necessarily the closest and the fastest. I'm not doing any pings or GEO DNS tricks — but so far this works when something breaks.

How it works — in a nutshell:

I use http://mirrors.ubuntu.com or launchpad's list of mirrors to retrieve servers.

I do a simple check on each (for HTTP Response Status Code).

LBNL, I update /etc/apt/sources.list.

Please note: This assumes that people play nice and put additional mirrors (e.g. 3rd party repositories into /etc/apt/sources.list.d. But I guess that means there's room for improvement.

You can obtain this tool like so:

$ [sudo] gem install apt-spy2

The cli comes with list, check, fix and help (with extended information on how to use it).

I tried to document as much as possible in the project's README.

The current version is a very conservative 0.5.0.

The code is open source and the license is liberal. And I take all contributions.