xcode-select --install fails

[Brandon Allbery]

On Sun, May 25, 2014 at 12:10 PM, William H. Magill <magill at mac.com> wrote:

> Ok, as expected... however, when clicking "Install"
> after the EULA
> it pauses a moment, pops up "Getting software" and the barber-pole then...
> "Can't download the software because of a network problem."
>
> ===
> Any guesses on what is happening?
>

Lots of guesses, no idea if any of them apply....
Some things that come to mind:

- sometimes you get an IPv6 address, and you have local (but not
link-local) IPv6 without having an upstream IPv6 connection.

- Apple's software distribution goes via Akamai, and sometimes a particular
Akamai server will be out of date or broken; this can be exacerbated by DNS
caching either locally or by an upstream DNS server, so you'll keep getting
the broken server until the cache(s) expire. (Note that there is nothing
you can do about upstream DNS caches, except try to avoid them by
temporarily switching to a different DNS provider such as OpenDNS or
Google's public DNS. But this won't help if Akamai gives out servers based
on load and the load on the broken server is low because it's broken.)

- Apple recently redid a bunch of stuff on their network. It's taken a
while for the MacPorts services that are hosted by Apple to get fully
straightened out, and I have occasionally noticed transient problems with
other Apple services including the App Store which may or may not be
related. (This, again, could well be compounded by Akamai: if the changes
confused Akamai's software enough, it could lead to delays or missed
updates on their servers, so they can't serve what they're supposed to.
"The more they overthink the plumbing....")

Other possibilities include broken routing inside your ISP or at its border
with higher tier networks, broken DNS inside your ISP (again, try one of
the other open DNS providers), buggy routes between higher tier providers,
etc. Sometimes the reason error messages are inscrutable is because so many
things could have gone wrong to produce a particular failure that about all
you can say is "it done broke som'ere".

-- 
brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine associates
allbery.b at gmail.com                                  ballbery at sinenomine.net
unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad        http://sinenomine.net
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