[Nottingham] Debian mirror oddity.

[Andy Davidson]

Hi, folks --

Any thoughts on the below.

We have around 150 Debian servers, and 30 Desktops in the office.  Some 
of the servers are QA machines which are rebuilt regularly, and quite 
regularly, to a different build spec.  Building/patching would be 
quicker and smoother if we had a local mirror.

Inspired and charged, I set to and build a mighty fine, capacious, 
colourful server.  A colleague then found 'anonftpsync'[0] on the Debian 
site - a tool for populating the mirror, and we installed it on the box.


For many people and servers, the mirror is working fine.  Folk using apt 
version 0.5.28.6 are able to use the mirror OK.  Some people are not 
able to apt-get update from this mirror - I can't, running
0.6.41, nor can users of 0.6.38 ..


When I try, I get the message :

Err http://mirrors.dev.xxxx.co.uk sid Release.gpg
   Bad header line


Googling around for this 'Bad header line' message suggests that there's 
an issue with the mirror itself (mismatch between the respository and 
the Packages file, or similar).  I took this to mean that we were 
possibly syncing at a bad time, so tried a sync at a different time, and 
it still happens.  Googling also found mention of a bad proxy between 
apt-get and the mirror - but there is no proxy in the way.

It is possible to wget the affected files.  Looking at the headers, we see :

200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2005 13:35:22 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: "2aa006c-bd-433af6ce"
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Debian GNU/Linux)
`p)tent-Encoding: armored Hô
Content-Length: 189
Content-Type: text/pgp
Last-Modified: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 20:02:22 GMT
Client-Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2005 13:35:22 GMT
Client-Peer: 10.0.12.9:80
Client-Response-Num: 1

It's possible, I guess, that apt-get is barfing at the odd 
Content-Encoding line.

The apache config is :

<VirtualHost *>
   ServerName mirrors.dev.ebuyer.co.uk
   DocumentRoot /export
   ServerAdmin i.sysadmin at ebuyer.com
   CustomLog /var/log/apache/mirrors.log combined
   ErrorLog /var/log/apache/mirrors-error.log
   <Location />
      Options +Indexes +FollowSymlinks
      IndexOptions NameWidth=* +SuppressDescription
      DirectoryIndex .
   </Location>
</VirtualHost>


Any ideas ?



[0] http://www.debian.org/mirror/anonftpsync