Upgrading Ubuntu through a Mirror

I’d begun my upgrade to Jaunty last night around 7pm, and woke up this morning to find that the package downloads had hardly made any progress. This because the main Ubuntu servers are being hammered due to Jaunty’s release yesterday morning.

I followed one tutorial that should have set me up to download (and upload, I assume) all the packages through a peer-to-peer protocol, but that didn’t seem to help at all. It did make me more comfortable editing my /etc/apt/sources.list file, however, so I thought I’d try sticking some mirrors in there, rather than using the generic us.archive.ubuntu.com servers.

I found this list of mirrors, and noticed that there was one at MIT, only several blocks away from my apartment. I went into sources.list

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

…and did a search/replace on all instances of us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ with ubuntu.media.mit.edu/ubuntu/. Re-ran the upgrade through update-manager, and I was downloading at blazing speeds that completed in just about five minutes.

If you’re having a rough time getting your upgrade to complete, find a nearby server from this list and stick it into your sources.list file.

Looking forward to using 9.04!

Leave a Reply