If you’re on a college or university network, chances are you have access to internet2 (i2), the private internet that connects many higher education institutions.

Recently, I attended a meeting at the Ohio Supercomputing Center where the leadership of OARnet (a private fiber network in Ohio, which Case accesses) announced they were removing bandwidth limitations. Soon (perhaps now, even), our OARnet (and therefore i2) bandwidth will be at least 500mbits/sec, a 300% increase over our current service level.

You can exploit this new increase in bandwidth by selecting package mirrors that are on i2. Then, when you access them on your campus network, the traffic will be routed over the faster connection. For example, at Case our routers are smart enough to know if you are accessing a machine that is reachable over i2 and route your traffic accordingly.

So, fire up a terminal and type:

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

And then find-and-replace “us.archive.ubuntu.com” with a .edu package mirror (I use http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu/).

When I download packages, I would get a measly few hundred KB/sec. Now I get several MB (megabytes!) per second.

Leave any questions or comments below.

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