Help please

[Bill Cole]

On 15 Nov 2018, at 0:50, jam at tigger.ws wrote:

> I have installed macports many times, so I’m not naive about what to 
> do. I’ve never seen this. Can anyone point out my way forward:
>
> [twill] /Users/jam [15]% ping rsync.macports.org
> PING ftp.rrze.uni-erlangen.de (131.188.12.211): 56 data bytes
> 64 bytes from 131.188.12.211: icmp_seq=0 ttl=41 time=541.214 ms
> 64 bytes from 131.188.12.211: icmp_seq=1 ttl=41 time=457.434 ms
> …
> ^C
> --- ftp.rrze.uni-erlangen.de ping statistics ---
> 10 packets transmitted, 9 packets received, 10.0% packet loss
> round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 440.591/552.447/681.501/79.577 ms

You have a somewhat poor connection to rsync.macports.org, which is (as 
implied by the canonical name) in Germany. Even assuming that the lost 
packet is an artifact of the ^C and hence ignorable, the TTL on the 
replies says that you're 24 hops away and the times are long and very 
noisy. Are you in Australia? New Zealand? The Maldives? An 
over-subscribed dialup link in a flat in Berlin?

> [twill] /Users/jam [16]% sudo port -v  selfupdate
> Password:
> --->  Updating MacPorts base sources using rsync
> rsync: failed to connect to rsync.macports.org: Operation timed out 
> (60)

That's what one would expect from a VERY poor link, something much worse 
than your ping results would imply. Or from a path that simply isn't 
letting the rsync traffic through at all. This is absolutely a 
networking problem.

If you've been able to sync or selfupdate on the same link before, it 
isn't something inherent in your local network. If you were running 
something like LittleSnitch or LuLu you'd know it and probably get an 
alert regarding the blocked traffic or at least have experience with 
mysterious outbound blockages.

My *guess* is that this is outside of your control and that it will 
clear up in a relatively short time: hours to maybe a day or two. 
There's been substantial weirdness in global routing this week (A 
Nigerian ISP hijacked Google's & CloudFlare's traffic and aimed it at 
China by way of Russia, where it was blackholed. Not kidding.) It would 
not be a surprise to see a lot of transit providers, particularly 
inter-continental ones, making lots of new tighter route filtering 
policies on an urgent basis all at once and relying on the network to 
eventually stabilize after a period of strange behavior. Apart from the 
"oops" in Nigeria, there's been some press recently about China Telecom 
doing sketchy things with their routing to make networks paranoid.


-- 
Bill Cole
bill at scconsult.com or billcole at apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Available For Hire: https://linkedin.com/in/billcole