Re: [gentoo-mirrors] mirror fetch jobs and --checksum

[Nils Holland]

On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 07:08:28AM +0000, Robin H. Johnson wrote:

> All Portage calls will be including --checksum in future as well.

Hmm, wouldn't this require that all "end-user facing" mirrors do
actually support checksums as well? My own tiny little community
mirror does, but I noticed the following:

At least one of the officical German rotation mirrors from
rsync.de.gentoo.org, namely rsync15.de.gentoo.org (aka
ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de, or 137.226.34.46), doesn't seem to support
checksums. In its MOTD it says...:

| nils@teela ~ $ rsync rsync15.de.gentoo.org::
| --------------------------------------------------------------
| The features compression (-z) and checksums (-c) are disabled.
|
| More information about this server is available via HTTP:
| http://ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de/
| --------------------------------------------------------------

And this isn't just an outdated message, in practice I tried, as a
little test:

| nils@teela ~ $ rsync --recursive --links --perms --times -D --delete
| --timeout=300 --checksum
| ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de::gentoo-portage/metadata/news/ test/
| [...]
| rsync: read error: Connection reset by peer (104)
| rsync error: error in socket IO (code 10) at io.c(785)
| [Receiver=3.1.2]

Without --checksum, it does properly send me the contents of the news
directory.

Now, while I didn't test any other mirrors and thus can't say if they
(all) support --checksum, I can say that this particular primary
German rotation mirror doesn't. And if portage, in the future,
includes --checksum by default, then I fear people using / reaching
such a mirror (from a rotation) will be unable to sync as the server
might just abort the connection like it did in my test above.

So ... do we have a problem here?

Greetings,
Nils