Two weeks ago I posted about making aria2c the default transfer mechanism for our software management stack.
With libzypp 6.1.0 in Factory, this is already the case. With the first community round of testing, we got quite a lot of bug reports and feedback. Some stuff did not work because the implementation was wrong, while others just showed us that aria2 worked differently as we thought.
The upcoming 6.2.1 addresses the following issues:
- implemented speed indicators (bnc#475506). You should see transfer speed in applications that report it (like zypper).
implemented progress indicators correctly (bnc#473846). You should see progress reporting now in a consistent basis.
fixed broken pipe when looking for aria2c which caused a fallback to curl. (bnc#480930)
implement saving and reading mirror stats data in /var/cache/zypp/aria2.stats. This means libzypp now learns which mirrors are faster and more reliable for you and remembers it. Every usage adds more information to the “learning”.
handle failover correctly (bnc#481115). This means libzypp tries harder to get the file from alternate mirrors.
- various improvements in error and report handling. General code review and minor fixes.
How to test?
Peter added an interesting “test feature”. If a request happens with a header X-Broken-Mirrors then the openSUSE redirector will send you broken mirrors. So edit your root’s aria2.conf:
cat ~/.aria2/aria2.conf
header=X-Broken-Mirrors: true
And observe zypper.log. Even if errors are reported, libzypp should try other mirrors and get the file successfully.
You can go more extreme, and use “X-Broken-Mirrors: only”, which will give you only bad servers. Even in this case you will see libzypp try hard to get the file before giving up. How hard to try is configurable, see last post for more information.
Big thanks to Peter Poeml and Tatsuhiro Tsujikawa for all the feedback and support, and of course
And with this, feature 302923 is done 
and the rest is tracked as bugs.
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Are the available mirrors cached locally to enable zypp to try to obtain files from a mirror even if d.o.o is down?
Sounds awesome
I’m just wondering if this also means local failover since otherwise the redirector still would be a single point of failure (e.g. when it is down I’m screwed).
In case it isn’t implemented yet, would it please be possible that zypp gets a list of all mirrors (simply get the metalink for one of the files) per repository on running refresh. stores it locally and now, when the redirector isn’t available, simply falls back to the stored mirror list.
This would eliminate the last single point of failure and would make it really robust.
Also I would like to thank you for all the improvements you & your colleagues already added!
[...] ZYpp 6.2.1, no mirror will stop you [...]
Note that zypp should then get the list of mirrors by fetching the metalink of each repositories’ .repo file (and I guess that would be control.xml for yast format repositories).