Package: mirrors Severity: wishlist A few weeks ago, our Debian mirror partition filled up, stopping syncs from completing. Normally we would get an e-mail with the error output if sync failed, but we didn't for some reason (despite the Debian mirror and the Debian mirror logs being on their own partitions), and consequently the mirror was stale for many days until we noticed a signature error during one of our own apt updates. (As an aside, the specific issue was caused by the use of rsync's --delete-after; there was plenty of free space after the sync was run manually without this option).
This is one example of a class of failure where a mirror can become stale without the maintainer being aware of it. While there may be ways of detecting this specific problem locally, I think the better way to catch all failures is to use Debian's own mirror status report, which more closely represents an end-user's experience "from the outside". I am therefore requesting that https://mirror-master.debian.org/status/mirror-status.html be made available in any machine readable format (json, yaml, xml, whatever) to avoid having to parse HTML. I'll then be able to write a monitoring plugin to check all the fields for a specific mirror for indications of a problem, which I'll also release open source. I'm also happy to do this myself and send a patch if someone can point me towards the source for whatever generates mirror-status.html Regards David
