Bug in curl makes Fedora ftp:// URL installations fail with some mirrors

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Sat, Oct 16, 2010 at 11:49:39PM +0300, Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote:
> You can reproduce the bug like this:
> curl -o iputils-20071127-10.fc13.x86_64.rpm --range 1384-1400 ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/mirrors/fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/13/Fedora/x86_64/os/Packages/iputils-20071127-10.fc13.x86_64.rpm
> 
> It gives error "(28) FTP response timeout" after around one minute.
> (1384 is the size of the header in many rpms).

That command worked fine for me, with curl-7.21.0-5.fc14.x86_64, but I
realized that it worked because I was using a proxy.  So I would
suggest people do:

  unset ftp_proxy

before running the test.  The command fails in the way you described
without a proxy.

I looked at the trace (curl -v) and it looks like the FTP server
itself is not responding correctly.  The problem does not seem to be
the REST command, but the short RETR: curl only downloads 17 bytes
then closes the connection, but this appears to confuse the FTP
server.  The FTP server appears to die when this happens, whereas I
think I would expect it to send an error message on the control
connection.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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