setup.exe: Determine Geographically closest mirror programmatically

["Dr. Christoph Gille" <christoph.gille@charite.de>]

> Closest mirror?  I'm not sure what you mean by this.  'setup.exe' does not
> require this as a setting.  Actually, there is no such concept.  You need to specify
> a mirror to work with but you can do that with '-s'.

With each superfluous click I lose a user, so it would be best if setup.exe would be run within http://3d-alignment.eu/  without
user interaction.

I am not a network specialist, but
I see two possibilities how I could determine the closest cygwin mirror:

(I) I could compare the IP numbers  of all mirrors to the IP number of the client and make a guess of the geographically closest site.
I would use the site where the first digits of the IP match best and I would then probe a short file to check whether the mirror is indeed working.

(II) This is what I am currently using to determine the fastest database mirror for 3D-structures:
I fetch a tiny probe file from each database mirror and take the one with the shortest respond time.
This method is more simple  but as there are that many cygwin mirrors, I am not sure whether I would run into problems.

When I have the mirror I would set it with the command line option of setup.exe.
I think this would work and could be done easily. Do you have  other ideas?

Could you please tell me the URL of the file with the cygwin mirror list?

Cheers

Christoph





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