FTP Support in Kickstart Stops working part way through the install

[Andy Delcambre]

Binary package hint: debian-installer

FTP install support was recently added to the kickstart, it works partially, but after a certain point in the install, it is unable to connect to the ftp server anymore. I have tested this with both my local mirror and with us.archive.ubuntu.com. It always fails at exactly the same point.

The error message looks like:
May 19 19:44:37 in-target: Err ftp://us.archive.ubuntu.com dapper/main python2.4-libxslt1 1.1.15-1ubuntu1
May 19 19:44:37 in-target: Unable to connect to ftp:

In syslog, it works when the second column is main-menu and before, then does not work when the column says in-target.

I have attached the installer syslog.

[Andy Delcambre (adelcambre)]

Syslog from the installer while trying to kickstart from ftp.

The install line from the kickstart file was:
url --url ftp://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu

[Andy Delcambre (adelcambre)]

as requested by colin on #ubuntu-devel

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

The error message is bizarre: it's "Unable to connect to ftp:", with a double space between "to" and "ftp:"; looking at apt's source, this means that it thinks the host name is empty.

Michael, do you have any idea why this might be happening? I did notice one thing while comparing methods/ftp.cc and methods/http.cc, in the proxy setup code. methods/http.cc has:

   if (Proxy.empty() == true || Proxy.Host.empty() == true)

... while methods/ftp.cc has:

   if (Proxy.empty() == true)

Proxy is a URI in both cases. Shouldn't ftp.cc be changed to check that the proxy host is non-empty too?

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

The only way I've managed to reproduce this on a normal system so far is to set 'ftp_proxy=ftp://' in the environment (note that setting 'http_proxy=http://' is treated as equivalent to no proxy at all, as predicted by the code comparison above). I can't find any code in the installer that might do anything like this even by accident, though.

[Andy Delcambre (adelcambre)]

This is the kickstart file that was used on the broken install. There is no proxy in use anywhere in our system.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Rejecting bogus upstream task. (This bug remains open.)