Questions around /content

[luc14n0]

Hi there folks,

I'm in sort of a quest to find out information about the /content file. More exactly, what generates it. I ask because a while ago, an openSUSE user reported the following error, in our openSUSE Support Matrix room:

Repository 'Main Repository (OSS)' is invalid.
[download.opensuse.org-oss|https://cache.opensuse.net.br/tumbleweed/repo/oss/] Valid metadata not found at specified URL
History:
 - [|] Error trying to read from 'https://cache.opensuse.net.br/tumbleweed/repo/oss/'
 - Download (curl) error for 'https://cache.opensuse.net.br/tumbleweed/repo/oss/content':
   Error code:  Unsupported protocol or redirect (location: http://downloadcontent-br.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/repo/oss/content)
   Error message: Redirect to protocol "http" not supported or disabled in libcurl

The error is not relevant, as seen in the ticket I opened. What's bugging me is the /content file that regional MirrorCache instances give 302 responses (pointing to downloadcontent.opensuse.org, which doesn't have it):

$ curl -IL http://mirrorcache-eu.opensuse.org/update/leap/15.4/oss/content
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
content-length: 0
date: Sun, 02 Jul 2023 02:34:18 GMT
location: http://downloadcontent.opensuse.org/update/leap/15.4/oss/content
strict-transport-security: max-age=15768000

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Server: nginx
Date: Sun, 02 Jul 2023 02:34:19 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 146
Connection: keep-alive
Vary: Accept-Encoding

But download.opensuse.org, doesn't have the file either:

$ curl -IL http://download.opensuse.org/update/leap/15.4/oss/content
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Sun, 02 Jul 2023 02:33:14 GMT
Server: Apache
Vary: accept-language,accept-charset
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Language: en

Nor mirrors:

$ curl -IL http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/update/leap/15.4/oss/content
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Server: nginx
Date: Sun, 02 Jul 2023 02:38:30 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 239
Connection: keep-alive
ETag: "58299315-ef"

Grepping around this repo I see many mentions of this mysterious (to me) file. Can someone shed some light on this, please, do we need to get worried?

[mlandres]

@luc14n0 this might be part of the repo type probing probing, although probing should find a valid repodata/repomd.xml before trying content.

Repositories of type rpm-md use URL/repodata/repomd.xml as master index file.
Repositories of type yast2 (AKA susetags) use URL/content as master index file.
(check the Type column inzypper lr --details)

Type susetags was used by SUSE in Code12, mainly for the Pool-repos. For Update-repos we mostly used rpm-md.
In Code15 also the Pool-repos were switched to rpm-md.

It would need a zypper.log to see exactly why /content was referred to.

[luc14n0]

Ah, that's interesting. And makes sense.

Yesterday, during the major outage, I ran into an error where /content popped its head. Unfortunately, it was during a test - for something else - in a container that I already removed. But I remember it was during the metadata refresh, some repos got updated and then came the outage, right in the middle of it.

I'm going to see if I can't find the logs with someone who ran into this before.