[Nix-dev] Accessing cache.nixos.org

[James Cook]

On 2 March 2017 at 07:53, Mark Gardner <mkg at vt.edu> wrote:
> I have been having a lot of failures installing and rebuilding lately. The
> usual symptom is "", often 6 ("could not resolve host").
>
> For example here are some of the errors I am seeing as I attempt an
> installation (over and over again):
> - download-from-binary-cache.pl: could not download from
> 'http://cache.nixos.org/nix-cache-info' (Curl error 6)
> - curl: (6) Couldn't resolve host "cache.nixos.org'
> - download of 'https://cache.nixos.org/nar/....nar.xz' failed: No such file
> or directory
> - could not download '/nix/store/...-sudoers' from any binary cache
>
> Two days ago the problem could be traced to cloudfront.net (AWS US-East-1)
> having problems, but I don't know why the problems yesterday and today.
> Anyone know why? Anything I can do about it? Any work arounds? This is
> stopping me dead in the water...
>
> Mark
> --
> Mark Gardner
> --

The --fallback option to nix-env, nixos-rebuild, etc. will cause it to
build from scratch if the cache step fails. This will sometimes take a
long time.