[PLUG] Where should I download ubuntu from

Keith Lofstrom keithl at gate.kl-ic.com
Fri Jan 4 17:32:00 UTC 2013


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          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993



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