A quick shout-out to apt-smart

I recently had the pleasure of performing a release upgrade on an old Ubuntu server. The upgrade kept failing due to issues with the mirrors that were listed in /etc/apt/sources.list. Rather than resolving the issue by manually editing the sources, I stumbled across apt-smart, which auto-updated my mirror list, optimizing for speed.

Check it out here: https://github.com/martin68/apt-smart

After installing the package, I let apt-smart automatically fix my broken mirrors:

# Discover available mirrors, rank the mirrors by connection speed and 
# update status and update /etc/apt/sources.list to use the best available mirror.
sudo apt-smart -a

A few minutes later I was running the release upgrade without issue.

Latest Docs

• https://apt-smart.readthedocs.io/en/latest/