On Thu, Jan 03, 2013 at 04:01:02PM -0800, Jim Karlock wrote: > Where is a good place to download Ubuntu in the Portland OR area?
Not sure where the fastest download site is at any given moment, because that seems to vary with site load over time. However, a general rule of thumb is to pick a short path to a site with lots of bandwidth. "Short path" on the internet is more dependent on who your ISP is than anything else. Most ISPs around Portland connect to the rest of the Internet (and each other) through routers in Seattle. So ping time between my house on Frontier FIOS to another Frontier FIOS customer in Washington County is typically under a millisecond, and at 15Mbps I can move an 800 megabyte distro image in about eight minutes. To Portland State or Oregon State, even though they have very fat pipes, it is slower. You can use the program "traceroute" to see the path your packets take to any given destination. For example, the packets from my house to my outside server in Dallas TX route through Beaverton to Seattle, then San Jose, then Los Angeles, then Dallas, with a few scattering through Houston. Packets to PSU or OSU bounce through Seattle as well. Your mileage is guaranteed to vary. Sometimes traceroute doesn't work right, but ping (for end to end measurements) almost always does. That said, I usually use Oregon State Open Source Labs for downloads. Not as much because they are always the fastest, but because they have a heck of a lot of bandwidth, and they mirror almost everything they aren't the main hosting site for.. The cost to them (and us the taxpayers) is very low, because they are sitting on huge fiber resources they got in some clever right-of-way negotiations with the big carriers (much of the trans-Pacific fiber traffic passes through OSU land). And I trust them to know what they are doing. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
