a76cb2aa6a
The run used to end by asking someone to copy a line and paste it "wherever you
got this from". That is not a loop, it is a hope. At a few hundred people in one
quiet channel, with one shot and no chance to say "please run it again, we made
a mistake", the drop-off between seeing output and pasting it somewhere is
where the whole exercise dies.
So the run now ends with a link, a plain-English list of what the link
contains, and Enter to open it. No account, no form, no mail client, no
assumption about being logged into anything.
· Query parameters, not an encoded blob. A blob would be shorter and would
let us send more; it would also mean the person clicking cannot read what
they are sending, which is the one thing this program has going for it.
· It carries more than the clipboard line did, because nobody has to eyeball
it in a chat window: every requirement check individually rather than only
the aggregate verdict -- which single requirement stops people is the thing
worth knowing -- plus the full latency triple, the 24-hour launch
histogram, and the five largest titles.
· `--submit-url` points it at a local worker; `--no-open` prints only.
· The clipboard line stays as the offline path: a headless host, a machine
with no browser, or somebody who would rather not click a link we wrote.
Three corrections
1. Steam consent now defaults to yes. This is a questionnaire and the person
running it knows that; defaulting to no framed our own instrument as
something to be wary of, and the yes/no still asks.
2. The virglrenderer check is gone. It could only ever report "present,
patch state unknown" -- a row incapable of passing -- and the box now
carries its own virglrenderer and Mesa inside the image it runs in, so the
host's copies are not on the path. It was telling prospective hosts their
machine was wrong when it was not.
3. The roadmap question -- cloud, or reach my own machine from anywhere -- is
now question one, of everybody. It was going to be a channel poll, and the
channel is no longer the only way in. It is asked first because a
respondent who quits after one question should have answered that one.
Two collisions found while wiring it up: the `gpu` check id overwrote the GPU
model parameter (last-writer-wins in a query string is a silent loss), so check
ids are prefixed `ck_`; and both renderers now take the assembled report rather
than seven positional arguments that had to be kept in step by hand.
nesdoctor
Is this machine any good — as a Nestri host, or as a client?
nesdoctor
Checks every hard requirement for running a Nestri box, measures what your connection actually does when it is busy, and asks at most five questions.
Nothing is uploaded
There is no server. No telemetry endpoint exists, and there is no build of this
program that reports home — the network test talks to Cloudflare's public
speed-test sink and to 1.1.1.1, neither of which is ours.
The output is a line on your terminal. If you want us to have it, you paste it somewhere. If you do not, we never had it. That is a property of the design rather than a promise about our intentions: there is nothing to switch on later.
The shareable line carries no hostname, no IP, no username, no game titles and no file paths — a size band rather than a size, and an hour histogram rather than timestamps. It is put on your clipboard at the end so pasting it is one keystroke.
The long version lands in nesdoctor.json: every check with its reason, the
full latency series, and your installed titles with sizes and launch times if
you said yes to Steam. That file is considerably more useful to us than the
line — it is what lets us size a game library and see which requirement
actually stops people — so do have a read through it and send it along if
nothing in there bothers you. Plain JSON, entirely optional, and the one-line
version is already plenty.
Reading your Steam library needs an explicit yes, and the question is asked last, after you have seen what this program does.
The number worth running it for
Everybody knows their download speed. Almost nobody has seen how much latency their connection adds when it is busy, and for anything interactive that is the figure that decides it:
upstream 28 Mbps
latency, idle 179 ms
latency, loaded 198 ms
added under load +19 ms grade B
A 500 Mbps uplink that queues for 300 ms under load cannot carry a game. A
25 Mbps one with fq_codel or CAKE can. If your grade is C or F it is almost
always a router setting rather than a line you need to upgrade.
Options
--no-net |
Skip the network test (it uploads ~100 MB) |
--no-steam |
Never look at Steam, and do not ask |
--yes |
Take the defaults — for a second run, not a first |
--json <PATH> |
Where to write the full report |
--quiet |
Only the summary line, for scripting |
--no-open |
Do not offer to open a browser; just print the link |
--submit-url |
Where the submit link points (default https://doctor.nestri.io) |
Verdicts
HOST-READY |
Passes everything, and close enough to the network to serve others |
HOST-READY-LOCAL |
Passes everything, but far enough out that it can only serve players nearby |
HOST-NET |
Good machine; the connection is in the way |
HOST-FIXABLE |
Nothing is a hardware limit — what is missing can be installed |
CLIENT |
Not a host. A complete answer, and what most machines are |
UNKNOWN |
A blocking check could not be run. An unknown is not a no |
Sending it back
At the end it prints a link, lists in plain English what the link contains, and opens it when you press Enter. That is the whole submission — no account, no form, no email client.
The link is built from readable query parameters rather than an encoded blob. A blob would be shorter and would let us send more; it would also mean you cannot read what you are sending, which is the one thing this program has going for it.
If you would rather not click a link we wrote, the short line is printed too and put on your clipboard.
What it deliberately does not tell you
- A pass is not a promise. Every check is a necessary condition. Nothing here runs under load, so a machine that passes can still fail on block I/O.
vulkaninforeporting the encode extension is not proof the path works. We have had a correct extension list over a broken path before.- The host's
virglrendererand Mesa are not checked at all, on purpose. The box carries its own inside the image it runs in, so the host's copies are not on the path — and a row that could only ever say "present, patch state unknown" told prospective hosts their machine was wrong when it was not.
Building
cargo build --release -p nesdoctor
Four dependencies, three of them serde/clap/anyhow. Everything that could
be done with std is: the VDF parser, the platform probes and the text wrapping
are all in-tree, because a binary handed to strangers has a dependency tree that
is part of its interface.
A static build, for a release someone downloads rather than compiles:
cargo build --release -p nesdoctor --target x86_64-unknown-linux-musl