mirrorselect

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Resources

Project

GitWeb

The mirrorselect program provides a nice interface to set the GENTOO_MIRRORS variable and the Gentoo rsync mirror.

Installation

Emerge

Install app-portage/mirrorselect:

root #emerge --ask app-portage/mirrorselect

Usage

Select the Gentoo source mirror(s)

Interactively find Gentoo source mirrors (and set or update the GENTOO_MIRRORS variable):

root #mirrorselect -i

* Modifying /etc/portage/make.conf with new mirrors...
        Reading make.conf
        Moving to /etc/portage/make.conf.backup
        Writing new /etc/portage/make.conf
* Done.

Notice that a backup copy of /etc/portage/make.conf will be created by mirrorselect before updating it.

Users can also specify a country (United States of America, for example):

root #mirrorselect -i -c USA

The following command finds the 3 fastest servers by downloading 100K from each; it will use all available mirrors in the list:

root #mirrorselect -s3 -b10 -D

Options

Please consider using one of these additional options to limit the available mirrors in the list it tests.

Server type selection:


    -c COUNTRY, -country COUNTRY
                       only use mirrors from the specified country NOTE:
                       Names with a space must be quoted eg.:  -c 'South
                       Korea'
   -F, --ftp           ftp only mode. Will not consider hosts of other types.
   -H, --http          http only mode. Will not consider hosts of other types
   -r, --rsync         rsync mode. Allows you to interactively select your
                       rsync mirror. Requires -i or -a to be used.
    -R REGION, -region REGION
                       only use mirrors from the specified region NOTE: Names
                       with a space must be quoted eg.:  -R 'North America'
   -4, --ipv4          only use IPv4
   -6, --ipv6          only use IPv6

Select the Gentoo rsync mirror

Note
Gentoo documentation states:

Gentoo is hosted by many mirrors around the globe. Selecting a mirror that is geographically near may help speed up repository syncs.

Note
But Gentoo handbook recommends to keep default settings:

The default sync-uri variable value listed above will determine a mirror location based on a rotation. This will aid in easing bandwidth stress on Gentoo's infrastructure and will provide a fail-safe in case a specific mirror is offline. It is recommended the default URI is retained unless a local, private Portage mirror will be used.

The default configuration of the Gentoo repository comes from sys-apps/portage and is located at /usr/share/portage/config/repos.conf. However settings in /etc/portage/repos.conf override it.

mirrorselect will not create the /etc/portage/repos.conf/gentoo.conf file automatically. If that file does not exist, mirrorselect will default to using the old make.conf SYNC variable which has been deprecated. In order to avoid this make sure Portage is up to date and copy the repos.conf file from Portage's /usr (library) location to the /etc (configuration) location:

root #emerge --ask --update sys-apps/portage

root #

mkdir /etc/portage/repos.conf

root #

cp /usr/share/portage/config/repos.conf /etc/portage/repos.conf/gentoo.conf

Note
For additional repos.conf documentation and configuration please refer to Portage/Sync#Portage_configuration

Then find a Gentoo rsync mirror with mirrorselect (make sure to use sync-type = rsync):

root #mirrorselect -i -r -o >> /etc/portage/repos.conf/gentoo.conf

Just navigate to the mirrors of choice and press Space to select one (or more) mirrors.