Re: Connecting to ftp.gnu.org ... failed: Connection refused.

On 8/17/25 7:23 AM, "md" ([email protected] via alfs-discuss 
Mailing List) wrote:
> Hi,
>
> For about a week downloads from ftp.gnu.org fail after about 10 attempts are
> made:
> wget https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gzip/gzip-1.14.tar.xz
> --2025-08-17 13:55:06--  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gzip/gzip-1.14.tar.xz
> Resolving ftp.gnu.org (ftp.gnu.org)... 209.51.188.20, 2001:470:142:3::b
> Connecting to ftp.gnu.org (ftp.gnu.org)|209.51.188.20|:443... connected.
> HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
> Length: 885748 (865K) [application/x-xz]
> Saving to: ‘gzip-1.14.tar.xz’
>
> gzip-1.14.tar.xz           55%[==================>                 ] 476.02K
> 658KB/s               ^C
> ...
> wget https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gzip/gzip-1.14.tar.xz
> --2025-08-17 14:08:26--  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gzip/gzip-1.14.tar.xz
> Resolving ftp.gnu.org (ftp.gnu.org)... 209.51.188.20, 2001:470:142:3::b
> Connecting to ftp.gnu.org (ftp.gnu.org)|209.51.188.20|:443... failed:
> Connection refused.
> Connecting to ftp.gnu.org (ftp.gnu.org)|2001:470:142:3::b|:443... failed:
> Network is unreachable.
>
> You may be able to reproduce the problem by running:
> for i in $(seq 1 15); do timeout 0.5 wget
> https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gzip/gzip-1.14.tar.xz; done
>
> See also
> https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/issues/27830#issuecomment-3179784766
>
> Marcin

This one is a bit different. I received a ban from ftp.gnu.org yesterday 
for downloading too many files at a time, and in my case it was also 
while using jhalfs. The ban behavior exhibits itself as a "Connection 
Refused" error, while the DDOS-related problems are due to timeouts.

I haven't figured out the threshold quite yet and don't really want to 
try to figure out what the magic number is, but after that it appears 
they have fail2ban or a similar service ban the IP address. This was due 
to heavy automated downloads and AI scraping of ftp.gnu.org and 
lists.gnu.org.

Other editors and users: Please do not run that for loop. You will also 
end up banned from ftp.gnu.org.

Marcin, you'll need to reach out to [email protected] and 
[email protected] and let them know that you have been wrongfully 
banned. I am still awaiting to hear back on my own as well, as it's been 
more than 24 hours now and I am still banned as well.

This is a bit of a tricky problem for as, as many mirrors from 
ftpmirror.gnu.org exhibit problems such as SSL Renogotiation Errors 
which make them very hard to trust. For core packages especially, being 
able to trust the downloads is important. I looked into what it would 
take for us to have our own mirror, and it looked like it would take 
200GB+ of disk space (and we can't just mirror certain portions of it 
either unfortunately).

- Doug

-- 
http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/sympa/info/alfs-discuss
Unsubscribe: See the above information page