Quote Originally Posted by Markus
The word mirror says it all, they're supposed to be identical. Just that the de ones are in germany, and the us ones in usa. You can use apt-spy to find a mirror close to you or have a look at the debian mirror site. For instance I'm in Finland and so I use:
# Unstable Finland
deb ftp://ftp.fi.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
deb ftp://ftp.fi.debian.org/debian-non-US unstable/non-US main contrib non-free
apt-spy overwrites your sources.list file. What I did was:

1. Backup the original sources.list file
2. Optional: Modify sources.list to use the official debian mirrors from your country. I changes all the .de. to .us.
3. Run apt-spy with the parameters I needed
4. Add the results from apt-spy to the original sources.list instead of replacing the old file. So in case 1 mirror fails for any reason, there will be a 2nd one to go and look at.

My sources.list looks like:
Code:
# Stable
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free
deb http://debian.fifi.org/debian/ stable main

deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free
deb-src http://debian.fifi.org/debian/ stable main
--GN