For those of you who are unaware, the latest Ubuntu release – Jaunty – was released several days ago. Normally, the fastest way to get the latest version is to torrent an ISO… the repositories are so overloaded attempting to do an upgrade is not even remotely possible. However, there is an alternative I stumbled upon. Instead of using the default Ubuntu repositories, select the fastest mirror, apt-get update, then upgrade away! I was getting sustained rates of 300 KB/s without any issue during my upgrade.
On a related note, I’ve considered tinkering with creating my own local repository mirror. Not that I have nearly enough machines to make it necessary, but it would be an entertaining exercise. Even found a basic HOW-TO or two. However I have heard of potential issues: it can take weeks to fully mirror several distributitions (several GB each) and with an incomplete repository it would be somewhat pointless to use. Luckily there seems to be an easy solution with mod_rewrite.