Welcome to the apt-panopticon explanations page.

The purpose of this page is to try to explain everything shown on the results page, so that the results page can link to the various parts for the curious.


IPV4 tests

Tests are tested over IPv4 if the mirror has IPv4 addresses.


IPv6

Tests are tested over IPv6 if the mirror has IPv6 addresses.


FTP tests

The FTP tests have not been written yet.


HTTP tests


HTTPS tests


rsync tests

The RSYNC tests have not been written yet.


DNS round robin tests

The "DNS round robin" column lists the IP addresses for each mirror that is part of the DNS round robin, or DNS-RR.   The IPs are linked to the log for that specific IP when used via the DNS round robin, and is followed by the number of errors, warnings, or timeouts of any.


Protocol tests

The Protocol test will give a warning if the protocol is changed during a redirect, HTTP -> HTTPS for example.   While apt HTTPS transport is now the default in Beowulf / Buster, not everyone with an older release will have that installed, so redirecting HTTP to HTTPS will break apt for those people.   An error is given instead if that happens for mirrors in the DNS round robin.   Servers in the DNS round robin will not have the HTTPS certificate for the round robin domain, so redirecting to HTTPS for that is a mistake.


URL sanity tests

The URL sanity test replaces "/" in URLS with "///", to see if the mirror can cope with that.   This might happen due to a mis configuration by the apt user, but decent web servers should cope with that.   The result for a mirror that does not cope is a failed download for that use, so this is an error.


Integrity tests


Updated tests


Speed test

The speed test tries to guess at a minimum and maximum speed range for each mirror.   It does this by measuring the reported speeds from the curl commands that actually download files.   Since apt-panopticon is trying hard to download everything from all mirrors all at the same time, this guess will be low.   Also, the computer running the apt-panopticon might have a network connection that is busy with other things.   Finally, the tested mirror may have a bigger network connection than the computer running the test, so wont show it's true maximum.   So take this speed measurement with a grain of salt, it's more of an indication, the full graphs might be useful.