The original post: /r/ubuntu by /u/no-names-here on 2024-11-14 23:25:11.

Do you miss netselect?

Yeah me too.A lot.

Other Distros have tools to select the fastest mirror… Debian has netselect-apt, Arch has reflector, i could go on but why wollow in sadness?

Instead, i did a thing! -> mirrorselect

How is this different from other tools?

  1. The built-in mirror optimization requires a desktop environment. This doesn’t.
  2. netselect-apt isn’t available on Ubuntu anymore. Yeah you can get the deb and install it, but its broken anyway.
  3. The Ubuntu mirror service:
    1. Doesn’t return the same information every time its called
    2. Only tells half the story (the half their server can see).

But, importantly, mirrorselect does a few things that other tools aren’t doing:

  • Testing TCP latency through an HTTP HEAD request, including the responsiveness of the HTTP server.
    • Traditional ICMP/Ping testing doesn’t do this.
  • Actual download speed testing.
    • (IKR? Crazy that one would use download speed as a key metric to evaluate download speed. For some reason other tools don’t actually do this).
  • Automatic Country Selection (If you’re lazy)
  • Manual Country Selection (If you love privacy)
  • Multi-stage ranking process: First TCP latency, then download speed.

You can find it here: