This afternoon I was trying to install GD2 to test a few things with a MAMP server on my iMac. I couldn’t install it using MacPorts, though. It went something like this:

# sudo port install gd2
Password:
---> Fetching expat
---> Attempting to fetch expat-2.0.1.tar.gz from http://internap.dl.sourceforge.net/expat
[...15 minutes later...]
^C

I dug around forums for about an hour trying to find a reason why it wasn’t downloading. Looked like it might be a problem with the mirror, but I wasn’t sure.

Turns out MacPorts just needed an update:

# sudo port -v selfupdate

After about 3 minutes of that, I was able to run the first command and it worked perfectly. (My suspicion was right, too: this time, it went to http://softlayer.dl.sourceforge.net/expat instead.)