[Wolves] SuSE FTP Problems - word of warning

[Peter Evans]

On Friday 28 Jan 2005 10:46, Peter Cannon wrote:
> Can you expand on the above a little please?

I'll try :)

Those people not using SuSE might want to skip the rest of this though.

Logged on this morning to my Linux box for the first time in a couple of weeks 
and got the usual 'You've got updates' icon from susewatcher.  So I fired up 
YOU (Yast2 Online Update) and tried to fetch the patches from the site I 
normally use - ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse - but I continually got the 
message 'Error - patch information retrieval failed'.  After re-trying for a 
few times I changed the site to an HTTP alternative (not a *.suse.* site) and 
the patch proceeded normally; YOU completed gracefully and all was well.

Next I went to check if there were any application/KDE updates (I'm running 
9.1 Pro - I don't think I'll actually upgrade until SuSE 10 comes out).  To 
do this I fire up YaST and in the 'Software' section use the 'Install and 
Remove software' option.  The resulting selection of packages showed me that 
there was an update to K3b and when I selected it for update and tried to 
download it I got a prompt asking me to put 'Supplementary KDE 3.3 update 
CD1' into my CD drive.  This is particularly weird since I don't have any 
update discs I get them all from the SuSE ftp sites.  So I cancelled the 
operation and when into the 'Change Source of Installation' option in YaST 
only to find that the entries I had in there previously have all disappeared 
- including the original entry for installing from the DVD device.

Slightly puzzled (and dreading that something serious was going wrong) I 
attempted to rebuild the sources, but when I went to get the URL from my 
Konqueror shortcuts I found that ftp://ftp.suse.com just isn't responding to 
anything.  There's a note on one of the sites I googled looking for some help 
that reckons that some people have been using the SuSE ftp site 'aggresively' 
with 90+ concurrent connections in a session (that wouldn't be you 
downloading would it Pete :P) and that people are now recommended to use the 
mirror sites instead.

I just wanted to warn people that do use SuSE here (all three or four of us) 
that they might see similar issues if they have their YOU or Install/Remove 
source set to one of the 'official' SuSE sites.

> Your more experienced than me...

Very nice of you to say so, but more than likely only one more page ahead of 
you in the manual (definition of a good consultant) - if that.

> As a side issue, but probably not connected there is an open office update
> available for Fedora (and everyone else I presume) the file is over 120MB

No OO updates listed for 9.1 and I don't have any problems opening it either 
atm - looks like a 9.2 specific issue.  Also like you I have lost my systems 
notifications sounds - they've re-opened the bug in KDE, but if you really 
miss them you could try running 'kdeinit knotify', which is known to work for 
some people.

Hope this helps - or at least makes things clearer.
-- 
Regards,

Pete Evans