Re: Unable to ftpsync-cron from free.hands.com

Here, by the way, is the reason we were using free.hands.com in the
first place, from an e-mail from 2017:

> http://debian.mirror.uk.sargasso.net/debian/project/trace/debian.mirror.uk.sargasso.net
> suggests you're syncing from ftp.uk.debian.org.
>
> However, we recommend mirrors not sync directly from service aliases
> such as ftp.<CC>.debian.org (only http is guaranteed to be available at
> ftp.<CC>.d.o sites).  Maybe change your config to sync from
> the site currently backing ftp.uk, in this case free.hands.com.

On Mon, 21 Feb 2022 at 13:56, David Croft <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> We are no longer able to sync from free.hands.com (ftp.uk.debian.org)
> since 25 January
>
> ftpsync-cron does a curl of
> http://free.hands.com/debian/project/trace/free.hands.com to check the
> current version. This worked fine for a long time.
>
> Now free.hands.com links to ftp.uk.debian.org instead and is no longer
> accessible on that URL. That would be okay, except that if I change my
> RSYNC_HOST to be ftp.uk.debian.org instead, now ftpsync-cron looks for
> http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/project/trace/ftp.uk.debian.org, which
> of course does not exist because the machine still considers itself to
> be free.hands.com
>
> Can this please be fixed (and changes like this announced in advance in future)?
>
> Either the machine needs to consider itself to be ftp.uk.debian.org in
> the trace directory, or the http://free.hands.com URLs still need to
> work.
>
> Alternatively ftpsync-cron needs to be amended to allow the RSYNC_HOST
> to be different from the "what the host considers itself to be in the
> trace directory", although I don't consider this an elegant solution
> as then people will need to have to make further guesses as to what
> the different hostnames should be and this is brittle against future
> upstream changes.
>
> Or best of all maybe we can finally be allowed to sync from a
> syncproxy host so we can have a reliable upstream and not have to
> repeatedly disappoint users with mystery issues like this stopping
> updates every couple of years until somebody notices and guesses what
> the latest upstream should be.
>
> Regards,
>
> David
>
> --
> David Croft