Oh well learned another thing about ftp :). I tried commanline ftp and found as follows. The reason mirror was not fetching files pointed to be symlinks seems to be a case of the remote server not responding to "ls -L" by not unwrapping (???) symlinks ( -L option to ls ).
Bugger !! my local NZ mirror here does this as well grrrr. ftp.debian.org does the same. ftp.us.debian.org works ok. Anyway ill try the "au" mirror for now. though connections in NZ and suprisingly the us are ussually great unlike "au" ( think my isp links thru "us" somehow? ). time to crash :) cheers
