Great! Thanx for the info. Sounds like just what I need.

OK, I'm at home right now but I'm installing apt-spy by sshing in to one of school PCs in question. apt-spy is now running. Cool, I see what its doing. Its trying to login to known debian repositories and download a file that should be common to all. As it does this it tracks which sites timeout and makes a note to avoid these, I suppose. Also its benchmarking how fast each site is. Where does apt=spy get its list of sites, I wonder? Looks like this will take a long time....

Well, once apt-spy fixes my sources.list can I simply copy this file to all my other PCs that suffer from the same ailments or do I have to run apt-spy on each one?

BTW, after apt-spy ran, I found only 3 stable sites listed in sources.list! OK, out of force of habbit, after I switched those entries to unstable, I ran apt-get update and then installed everything I wanted! Thanx again.

Just wondering though, what apt-get install base-config would do (I skipped that step)?

TIA,
AJG