4.7. Debian mirrors

The various download archives and the web site have several mirrors available in order to relieve our canonical servers from heavy load. In fact, some of the canonical servers aren’t public — a first tier of mirrors balances the load instead. That way, users always access the mirrors and get used to using them, which allows Debian to better spread its bandwidth requirements over several servers and networks, and basically makes users avoid hammering on one primary location. Note that the first tier of mirrors is as up-to-date as it can be since they update when triggered from the internal sites (we call this push mirroring).

All the information on Debian mirrors, including a list of the available public FTP/HTTP servers, can be found at https://www.debian.org/mirror/. This useful page also includes information and tools which can be helpful if you are interested in setting up your own mirror, either for internal or public access.

Note that mirrors are generally run by third parties who are interested in helping Debian. As such, developers generally do not have accounts on these machines.