Mirror prober "Data must not be unicode" error

[Florian Ignaz]

I received a mail that my mirror verification failed "Launchpad: Verification of faigner.de-release failed"

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+mirror/faigner.de-release

It reports "Failed https://mirror.faigner.de/ubuntu/bionic/ubuntu-18.04.5-desktop-amd64.iso: Data must not be unicode".
The full log is here: http://launchpadlibrarian.net/548268216/faigner.de-release-probe-logfile.txt

Everything is running fine and smooth on the mirror server.

I also noticed the number of officially used mirrors (https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+cdmirrors) decreasing by 20 the last two hours. Seems to affect the whole mirroring system.
Each time a verification is due, the mirror disappears.

BR

Florian

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I think this is a regression from switching the mirror prober to Python 3.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I think this only affects HTTPS mirrors. I have a reproducer on a staging system now.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I've deployed a fix, so this should sort itself out the next time your mirror is probed. Let us know if that doesn't seem to be the case.

[Mirror Telepoint (mirrortp)]

Hello,

We are affected by the same bug (mirror.telepoint.bg). It seems that the prober doesn't run on our mirror anymore. Both archive and cd:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+mirror/mirror.telepoint.bg-cdimage

Would you please take a look?

Best Regards,
Valentin

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

@mirrortp It looks as though it just hasn't retried since I rolled out the fix, but I see no reason the prober shouldn't retry your mirror at some point - it should get round to it again soon. (We don't necessarily probe mirrors extremely frequently most of the time, due to the number of registered mirrors.)