[tex-live] Every fourth or five ftp attempt in tlmgr ... fails

[Bernhard Kleine]

Am Mittwoch, den 19.12.2012, 01:32 +0100 schrieb Reinhard Kotucha: 
> On 2012-12-18 at 21:03:13 +0100, Bernhard Kleine wrote:
> 
>  > Am Montag, den 17.12.2012, 20:30 -0400 schrieb George N. White III:
>  > > I've seen this quite often (Scientific Linux and OSX) at a campus with
>  > > a "corporate firewall".   Sometimes disabling tcp window scaling
>  > > helps.  
>  > > 
>  > 
>  > > 
>  > > On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 2:18 PM, Bernhard Kleine
>  > > <bernhard.kleine at gmx.net> wrote:
>  > >         Dear all,
>  > >         
>  > >         while updating using tlmgr --gui this morning I noticed again
>  > >         that every
>  > >         fourth or fifth package is not obtained by ftp but by wget.
>  > >         That does
>  > >         not directly pose a problem. However, the time spent by tlmgr
>  > >         for
>  > >         finding out that ftp does not work and wget has to be used is
>  > >         more than
>  > >         40 seconds. Thus the update takes much longer than necessary.
>  > >         
>  > >         See below the error. I hope that I am not the only one where
>  > >         this
>  > >         occurs. System is Ubuntu 12.04 on amd_x64 Linux.
>  > >         
>  > >         Kind regards
>  > >         
>  > >         Bernhard
>  > >         
>  > >         Useless content call in void context
>  > >         at /usr/share/perl5/LWP/Protocol/ftp.pm line 379
>  > >         TLDownload::get_file: response error:
>  > >           400 FTP return code 000
>  > >         permanent server connection set up, but downloading did not
>  > >         succeed!
>  > >         Retrying with wget.
>  > >         
>  > >         
>  > Hi George,
>  > 
>  > this is still strange: 80 % of the ftp calls are correctly executed, one
>  > fifth is not. I am sitting behind my private "Fritzbox! 6340 cable"
>  > router with a single PC attached to it. The internet provider is
>  > Kabel-BW. 
>  > 
>  > I had been thinking about a timing problem in tlmgr. What do the others
>  > think?
> 
> Did you set up your system to download from a particular server or are
> you downloading from CTAN, which redirects reqests to mirrors randomly.
> 
Dear Reinhard,

if set it up to start from CTAN and I get various mirrors 

> What's the output of
> 
>   tlmgr option repository

http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet

> 
> ?  I still don't know whether your problem is related to perl5/LWP
> vs. wget or to FTP vs. HTTP.
> 

> If it's related to FTP (as I deduce from your mails), you could try to
> set
> 
>   tlmgr option repository http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/ctan/systems/texlive/tlnet
> 
> in order to make sure that the HTTP protocol is used.  It would be
> very helpful to know whether this works.

This did indeed run through without any problems (24 packages as of
21:14 o'clock CET. 
> 
> You'll find a list of mirrors at
> 
>   http://dante.ctan.org/mirmon
> 
> Regards,
>   Reinhard 
> 


Thanks a lot!
Bernhard