Once again I have sporadic 404 errors in regular updates, and I again find myself wondering / worrying about how the design architecture of the update process ensures there isn’t a catastrophic problem due to mismatched versions of various components.
Surely if only 80% of the elements successfully download (today 6 out of 27 elements failed with 404 errors) sooner or later this system will be left in an inoperable state and fail to reboot?
Why should I be confident running dnf distrosync is a safe thing to do to a production system?
Thanks as always for all help,
Paul
Would need to know which mirrors 404’d, should have shown it on the console screen. Sounds like some are not in sync, or inaccessible for some reason. It’s not a problem at your end, but rather not being able to contact and download something.
I would however check all your repo files under /etc/yum.repos.d and make sure you are using mirrorlist, and not baseurl. Just in case you have blocked yourself to a single mirror, rather than being able to choose from a list that are in your location/area.
Cancel that – I’ve (again) noticed that these errors are transient. The following lines are successful retries to download the missing packages. I now remember that I’ve asked this before.
Memory loss in old age is a terrible thing!
It’s chosen rocky-linux-europe-west1.production.gcp.mirrors.ctrliq.cloud which is odd as I’m in Quebec.
I do understand why 404 errors occur on mirrors – they are a fairly common occurrence on this and other hosts we run. My understanding is that the problem cannot be 100% avoided and my question was about the design robustness of the update system given that some 404 failures are inevitable.
However, I belatedly realized not only that recovery for this is immediate as it retries a different mirror, but also that I’ve been through exactly this line of inquiry before. Apologies!
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It should be pretty robust, obviously the more mirrors available will mean there’s less chance of it happening.
More chance of it happening when updates have just been released since the main Rocky mirror will only have those packages, and then it’ll be a case of whenever all the other mirrors sync with the main Rocky one after which could take a few hours for the packages to be all over the world. Some mirrors may lag and not sync as often as they should do,
I tend to do a dnf clean all and then run it again to try and get it to try different mirrors instead of the ones it’s cached previously as it can help. I’ve had one or two issues myself where the ctrliq mirrors haven’t been in sync as quick as they should have perhaps been. If something keeps failing to download, I just leave it a short while and come back, and then it’s all OK. But usually I only experience that when packages/updates have just been released.