Arch Linux

DWilliams

Member

From: Everywhere

Registered: 2009-11-22

Posts: 119

pacman mirror troubles

For a while now I've had some strange behavior when updating my system with pacman. Midway through a download, it will error out with something like:

error: failed retrieving file 'package' from mirror

It will then cascade to another mirror and resume, many times then failing again and cascading to another mirror. Sometimes it says it could not resume and starts the download over from scratch.

My pacman.conf is just the default one with an extra repo added (and the repo works correctly, I've synced packages from it). I used rankmirrors to generate my top 6 mirrors. At first I just assumed it was something to do with just one or two mirrors being out of date or something but tonight it's hit record levels of problems. It started doing the previously mentioned problem on the main repo files (specifically extra.db.tar.gz keeps erroring out on multiple mirrors). It finally downloaded, but when it gets to the actual package I'm trying to download (eclipse-3.6-1-x86_64), it errored out on 5 of my mirrors and is currently downloading from the last mirror. It says it's downloading at 45K/s which is the usual speed for my connection. Looking at the file size downloaded though, it seems to hang and not download anything for a while then burst forward to catch up.

Does anyone know what the problem is? Could I just coincidentally ended up with a list of mirrors that tend to have problems?

x33a

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2009-08-15

Posts: 4,587

Re: pacman mirror troubles

It could be a problem with the mirrors, or it could also be a problem with your internet connection, or maybe dns.

Use this to check the status of your favourite mirrors.

https://www.archlinux.de/?page=MirrorStatus

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: pacman mirror troubles

I always use reflector to generate a list of 5 recently-synced mirrors just before the I update my system. If you generated the list months ago, no wonder you have problems.

Proofrific

Member

Registered: 2008-01-05

Posts: 215

Re: pacman mirror troubles

In addition to using up-to-date mirrors, you should also use mirrors that are geographically close to you (faster).  There's an ArchLinux script that ranks which mirrors are fastest for you.  See http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Imp … rankmirror for more info.