1. Choose the fastest server automatically. This is netselect, an ultrafast intelligent parallelizing binary-search implementation of "ping." You give it a (possibly very long) list of servers, and it chooses the fastest/closest one automatically. It's good for finding the fastest ftp.debian.org mirror, the least laggy IRC server, or the best Squid neighbour. This version also includes netselect-apt, which creates an apt sources.list file automatically from the huge list of Debian mirrors. From Debian 3.0r0 APT