Bug#345276: debian-installer: stage 2 gets delayed due to the installer hammering some ftp servers

[Michael Gilbert]

I did some more digging into this.  Joey is right, the problem doesn't appear to be due to hammering at all.

The "apt-get update" progress indicator displays downloading Packages and Sources data.  However, during the attempt to download the Sources data, the message "could not connect: connection timed out" is displayed.  So the problem is likely related to how the Sources data are downloaded.

On a hunch, I tried the etch beta 1 installer, and it worked flawlessly.  It looks like the Packages and Sources data are obtained via two apt-get commands issued separately on etch d-i instead of a single command as on sarge d-i.

Well, looks like this bug has already been fixed in the latest d-i versions.  Close it.

Happy new year.
mike

On 12/30/05, Joey Hess < joeyh@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Michael Gilbert wrote:
> during stage 2, the installer runs an "apt-get update", then "apt-get
> install mdetect" in rapid succession.  some ftp servers, such as
> ftp.debian.org , detect this as hammering and block connectivity for
> something like 2 minutes.  an error message about unable to connect
> to server is presented, which is potentially disconcerting to the
> user.  if not patient, he or she may give up on the install
> even though everything is working fine.

I've never heard of this happening before. I was able to reproduce the
connection throttling with this frankly abusive command (30
simulantaneous connections), but not if I just ran the commands you
mentioned in sequence. And all my command showed me is that
ftp.debian.org">ftp.debian.org has a limit of 10 concurrent connections from one ip
address; if I change it to run the wgets in series instead of parallell,
they all succeed without any throttling.

for x in $(seq 1 30); do wget -O /dev/null ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/unstable/main/binary-i386/Packages.bz2 & ; done

Do you have some kind of exceptionally fast internet connection to this
ftp server? Or a broken ftp proxy or stateful firewall? Or do you have a
whole network behind one ip that is all connecting to it at once or some
similar exceptional circumstance?

(Note: all tests done on a machine that is 13 hops and ~60 ms away from
ftp.debian.org">ftp.debian.org, average throughput is 470k/s.)

--
see shy jo


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