Suggestion: Add option to use GNU mirrorlist for downloading sources

Hi there,

I recently had an exchange with a sysadmin from the FSF after I was having trouble connecting to the GNU FTP server to download the required packages for LFS. Apparently they were having problems with DDoSes on their server, so they implemented a block on IP addresses that made several requests in a short time. Unfortunately, as I was downloading a large amount of packages from their server at the time (as you do for LFS), I got caught in this ban and was no longer able to connect.

I eventually resolved this by `sed`ing the wget-list to point to a mirror of the GNU FTP instead. As mentioned in the beginning, I additionally emailed GNU directly about this and got in touch with one of their sysadmins, who suggested I point to `ftpmirror.gnu.org` to automatically get redirected to the fastest mirror. I have done this when downloading subsequent source packages and it seems to work well.

Interestingly, the sysadmin mentioned that he wanted to send a suggestion to LFS, that they add a note advising users to point to `ftpmirror.gnu.org` if they are having trouble connecting to the main GNU FTP server. I agree that this would be useful advice, so I took the liberty of writing out this suggestion myself. I don't know how many people are experiencing connection issues with downloading sources, but I could imagine adding a little note in the download instructions could save some users a lot of hassle.

Let me know what you think!

Regards,
Glitch

-- 
http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/sympa/info/lfs-support
Unsubscribe: See the above information page