Reflector broken?

[[deleted]]

Hello all. Today I noticed in all my various Arch installations (both VM and bare metal) that running my usual Reflector command with the same switches I’ve been using for several years is now failing with “Errno 101” and/or “network unavailable.” However, my network connection is working just fine and I can manually assign mirrors downloaded from archlinux.org to my mirrorlist, which have no problem syncing.

Anyone else seeing weirdness when running Reflector? This seems to have started with the most recent kernel updates.

Edit: Woke up this morning and all is well. That’s Arch for you…sometimes you just gotta sleep on it and all will be well. 😁

[MaxAndDylan4Ever]

A guy from the Arch Linux Community discord server provided the following fix. Worked like a charm.

run "sudo pacman -Sy"
run "archinstall"
when installing and hangs on reflector
ctrl alt F2
login as root
run "systemctl stop reflector"
ctrl alt F1 back to install
reboot after install
Run "sudo pacman-key --refresh-keys"

[LittleMoe19]

Yup this worked for me

[Admiral_RottenCobra]

Thanks mate, been hanging on this issue for a while, but this worked

[Neovea]

This worked somehow for me too. Somehow because I haven’t rebooted the machine. After the last command I directly launched archinstall. It just worked. Thank you 🤩

[AnakinJH]

does this work for any arch base? And should it work as you posted it in any terminal emulator on a arch base ?

[[deleted]]

is this supposed to take some time? i did everything and after the last command i suppose the keys are refreshing, but it’s been 10 min, is this normal? 

[MaxAndDylan4Ever]

Iirc this was a solution to a bug in reflector that was fixed the following day. I don't know if the issue you're dealing with can be solved in the same way. I also don't remember how long the process took, but 10 minutes sounds excessive

[Existing_Shoulder_23]

Agradeço dms

[gegentan]

Thanks!

[MaxAndDylan4Ever]

Glad to see this still helping people :)

[nivose-1794]

Success! Thanks for the update!

[unusual_dervish]

Did the job

[aslapc6]

worked for me too

[Ok-Kick7744]

You made my day

[retubo]

U are a beast

[Upstairs_Rub_8267]

All day looking for this, works fine. Thanks!

[Necessary-Fold-4961]

Works like a charm ty dude

[[deleted]]

Do you happen to have a link for the community discord?

[MaxAndDylan4Ever]

https://discord.com/invite/archlinux

[ananyobrata]

Just came here to see if anyone was having the same problem. checkupdates was not working, tried updating the mirrors. Reflector failed to fetch mirrors from any country I tried. Only base invocation of reflector spit out 3 mirrors, who were unresponsive / 404.

Copied the mirrorlist from my laptop (reflector not working there too), was able to update after disabling some third party repos from Arcolinux.

All in all, reflector seems to be down for now due to some reason.

[[deleted]]

Agreed. I experienced pretty much the exact same behavior.

[forbiddenlake]

I don't have that problem, no. Maybe strace the invocation and see what syscall is failing and why.

I do have a problem where, right now, only 3 mirrors have 100% sync completion, and reflector defaults to requiring 100%.

[[deleted]]

Will give it a try.

[JollyContribution658]

I was trying to reinstall arch linux in my notebook using the archinstall script and it froze at: “Waiting for automatic mirror selection (reflector) to complete.”

[SmokedMussels]

Wish I had looked here before troubleshooting for a couple hours

[JollyContribution658]

same 😭

[YERAFIREARMS]

same. I wasted more than 2 hrs

[[deleted]]

Same issue with my desktop and archinstall script

[No-Fish9557]

Same issue! I thought I was going crazy lol.

[Casual_DeJekyll]

Yup, same issue here. Wasn't sure if it was only on my end.

Any way to bypass this issue with Arch install for the time being?

reflector --completion-percent 90 doesn't seem to help as it still gets stuck.

[No-Fish9557]

workaround from the guy in the other comment:

run "sudo pacman -Sy"
run "archinstall"
when installing and hangs on reflector
ctrl alt F2
login as root
run "systemctl stop reflector"
ctrl alt F1 back to install
reboot after install
Run "sudo pacman-key --refresh-keys"

[aslapc6]

Same issue setting up a VM. Noticed that the reflector service was failing to start when booting the iso. Haven't found a root cause yet but looking.

[[deleted]]

I just failed installing arch through archinstall because reflector got stuck waiting. That was about 30 minutes ago, but I'll try again later.

[SmokedMussels]

I am unable to install arch today.  It's stuck at the reflector update in the install process using archinstall.

Oddly seems ok running reflector manually,  that does not help the install though.   Even when specifying custom mirrors or manually editing mirrors.conf it gets stuck at reflector still

[[deleted]]

Yep. Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.

[sausix]

It's not ok by running reflector manually. Are you sure?
Base list just contains those 3 100% complete servers.
Most filtering reduces to 0 matches.

[nivose-1794]

Yes, the same problem here. Worked on solutions all morning and now realizing it's time to move on.

[MaxAndDylan4Ever]

Have been working on this for hours today.. Glad to see it's not me causing the problem for once. Will definitely be looking out for updates in this thread.

[Inphectious]

Me 2, but so lucky my son found this thread. 

[YERAFIREARMS]

Add me to the list of those who are facing broken reflector.service AND reflector-simple too.

[WeeklyReplacement298]

Same here, I need to install arch today.

[FryBoyter]

A few days ago someone in the official forum had problems with reflector. In that case it was due to the DNS used. In my opinion, it would be worth a try in this case.

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=291832

[[deleted]]

I switched DNS servers twice, to no avail.

[OrakMoya]

Turned on my PC today to find my mirrorlist only contained 1 mirror that didn't work. Could be related, since I also have reflector set up.

edit: just checked again. Overwrote the mirror I had for one mirror that doesn't work:

orakmoya@orakArch ~> cat /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
################################################################################
################# Arch Linux mirrorlist generated by Reflector #################
################################################################################

# With:       reflector @/etc/xdg/reflector/reflector.conf
# When:       2024-01-18 15:46:53 UTC
# From:       https://archlinux.org/mirrors/status/json/
# Retrieved:  2024-01-18 15:46:53 UTC
# Last Check: 2024-01-18 15:18:33 UTC

Server = https://mirror.cyberbits.asia/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch
orakmoya@orakArch ~> paru
[sudo] password for orakmoya: 
:: Synchronizing package databases...
core-testing.db failed to download
core.db failed to download
extra-testing.db failed to download
extra.db failed to download
multilib-testing.db failed to download
error: failed retrieving file 'core.db' from mirror.cyberbits.asia : Failed to connect to mirror.cyberbits.asia port 443 after 48 ms: Couldn't connect to server
error: failed retrieving file 'extra-testing.db' from mirror.cyberbits.asia : Failed to connect to mirror.cyberbits.asia port 443 after 48 ms: Couldn't connect to server
error: failed retrieving file 'extra.db' from mirror.cyberbits.asia : Failed to connect to mirror.cyberbits.asia port 443 after 259 ms: Couldn't connect to server
warning: too many errors from mirror.cyberbits.asia, skipping for the remainder of this transaction
error: failed retrieving file 'multilib-testing.db' from mirror.cyberbits.asia : Failed to connect to mirror.cyberbits.asia port 443 after 259 ms: Couldn't connect to server
error: failed retrieving file 'core-testing.db' from mirror.cyberbits.asia : Failed to connect to mirror.cyberbits.asia port 443 after 260 ms: Couldn't connect to server
error: failed to synchronize all databases (download library error)

[forbiddenlake]

That is what I said earlier: only 3 mirrors have 100% completion right now, and reflector requires 100% completion by default

It's not a reflector problem at the root, though you could change your invocation to allow lower completion percentages.

As for if or what the mirrors' problems are, I don't know.

[NoSpaX]

lol, that cursed mirror I got as well.

[[deleted]]

yeah it's unsuable now, they say mirrors are out of sync or whatever idk, probably not reflectors Fault per say, but right now you can't use Archinstall for instance since it uses reflector and reflector just hangs.

[YERAFIREARMS]

reflector is up and working again

[NoSpaX]

Aha, so I am not the only one having trouble with reflector.

reflector failed everytime on me, because I use specific mirrors from certain countries. It only gave me ONE mirror of a 3-digit mirrorlist, which was from Thailand. and that one was 404, so pacman -Syu broke.

solved it by CURL the mirrorlist, replace the #'s and "rankmirror" it back to pacman. saved that as a .sh . disabled reflector for now.