Greetings All, The redirector is causing problems again. Now with installation for many users. Some of the mirrors are broken or under heavy load, but the redirector is still redirecting people to those mirrors. This coupled with the fact that the openSUSE installer now selects "use online repositories" by default (a good thing) means that many people are experiencing failed installations. The real problem is the mirror "sticky" that means people always get the same mirror. This means that if the user gets a bad mirror and a package download timeout then the installation has essentially failed. If the user clicks retry he/she will get the same mirror, and a timeout again, and again. There is approximately 1minute timeout between attempts, and several hundred packages to install from online sources by default. This means even if the user clicks "skip" for each package it will take hours to complete the install. So the install has effectively failed because of the redirector's mirror sticky. Quite a number of users have commented on this behaviour, I have experienced it myself with 2 installs already. It has also been mentioned in some reviews, contributing to overall bad reviews of 10.3. Other distribution's solutions: 1: Round Robin DNS + No problem with redirector server going down + If one of the mirrors in rotation is broken clicking "retry" will likely select a good mirror. + Location based mirror selection not possible but can have e.g. eu.download.opensuse.org, us.download.opensuse.org ... etc - Frequently changing repositories such as on the build service, could bounce between new metadata & old packages and vice versa. 2: Mirror list files Other distributions use mirror-list-files which the package manager interprets. + No sticking-to-bad-mirror problem of the redirector. + Avoids the bouncing between mirrors problem of RR DNS. - The server with the mirror list on needs to be up when it is requested. - Cannot be achieved without modifying the client package management software. Sticky breaks installations, no sticky breaks general package management - what is the solution? Can the redirector do better checking on mirror availability and status? any thoughts? A solution that can be achieved by only modifying d.o.o so that future 10.3 installations can go smoothly is obviously preferable. _ Benjamin Weber --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-buildservice+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-buildservice+help@opensuse.org