Alas life got in the way and has delayed all my projects. So I'm sending
this email much later than I had planned.

apt-panopticon is basically ready for an alpha release.

With the blessing of the other Devuan devs (at least no one complained at
the time, or since) Evilham and I have decided to use the results of
apt-panopticon to decide which mirror servers are on the DNS-RR and which
are not. https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/mirror_list.txt will be updated
for things like "certificate expired, so they no longer support HTTPS",
"have been doing nothing but timeouts for sometime, so mark as offline",
etc. The DNS-RR will be modified to reflect serious issues.

Evilham wants me to go one step further, and automate things. His idea
was to run apt-panopticon once a minute, and report the results to a
backend that will automatically add or remove mirror servers to DNS-RR
depending on yet to be discussed pass conditions. On the fastest server
it is currently running on the average run time is slightly less than one
minute, so I think maybe doing this every five minutes. The goal is that
when someone uses the DNS-RR, they get as perfect an experience as we can
manage.

Pass conditions are likely to be something like - passes all tests with
no warnings (except HTTPS that DNS-RR can't handle anyway), 100% up time,
100% updated. Very few currently meet those conditions.

Apt-panopticon is running on two different servers now, plus my desktop,
and I'm awaiting a friend to get IPv6 for her server before I run it
there. Mostly coz running it on an actual mirror server means that
particular mirror gets disk speed tested instead of network speed, which
is not fair on the other mirrors.

So on my own mirror it runs every ten minutes, and shows ludicrous speed
for itself -

https://sledjhamr.org/apt-panopticon/results/Report-web.html

On a small server that rrq kindly let me use, it runs once an hour,
mostly coz it's a single core VM, running it more often will bog down his
server -

https://borta.devuan.dev/apt-panopticon/results/Report-web.html

Could all mirror admins PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE actually monitor one of
those, and actually correct any issues for your server, or at least talk
to me about it if you think the script is wrong. I'm kinda disappointed
that there has been almost no positive changes since I started telling
you all about this. There is way too many warnings and errors. If you
hover your mouse over the column titles, a short explanation of what is
being tested, and why will pop up. Remember, this is now the official
indication of how healthy our mirror system is.

--
A big old stinking pile of genius that no one wants
coz there are too many silver coated monkeys in the world.