Knowledgebase/Blog
Media upload issues
Andy Powell
posted this on Feb 07 09:22
We know there are some problems with uploading media to catalogs at the moment - not just that the user experience is horrible but that it plain ol' fails in a lot of cases, particularly when working over a slow connection.
This morning, I've spent a couple of hours experimenting with uploading the smallest FreeBSD ISO I could find (their 'bootonly' variant, which is 128MB) to our public catalog from my home machine over my home broadband connection. I tried this 5 times in all. Hey, I know how to have a good time!
The good news is that in a match between successful uploads vs. unsuccessful uploads, the successful uploads team won 3:2. Put less positively, that means a 40% failure rate, which is clearly unacceptable.
Note that, irrespective of whether the upload is successful, the usability of the process is pretty poor. On first use, you'll get two warnings about our certificates being broken (check the 'Trust certificates from this server' option before clicking 'OK' to accept the certificate (twice)). Then, for each subsequent transfer, there'll also be at least 2 (sometimes 3) other warnings that you have to 'OK' :-(. Furthermore, if the upload fails, then all of the buttons in the upload window seem to start reporting Javascript errors. Finally, even after a successful upload, you may well have to manually refresh the view of your catalog listing before you see the newly uploaded media.
Not good.
One thing I did note was that both times the upload failed for me this morning, it coincided with a loss of connectivity to the vCloud Director user interface - i.e. my main browser window was reporting "Service interruption - Unable to communicate with the server. Try to reconnect later.". Also, at least one of the times coincided with an open SSH connection to one of my VMs on the infrastructure being terminated unexpectedly.
So it looks like the failed uploads coincide with a more fundamental loss of connectivity? But it also feels like this must be related to the upload, since I don't think I've ever seen unexpected loss of connectivity at any other time. I.e. I don't think we're seeing random connectivity problems.
If you are also having problems with media uploads (I know that some of you are)... please report them here by raising a ticket and please comment below if you can endorse (or deny) my hunch that this is related to a more fundamental loss of connectivity in some way.
Thanks.
Comments
I had real issues uploading media to begin with, but a reinstall of java fixed it for me (I'm using Ubuntu). I've also not experienced any connection issues with the browser or a VM, and that's from my home virgin line which is currently broken (very high packet loss). I generally have it open all day, and the only disconnects I get are the usual time outs.
This morning, I increased two of the timeout settings on our cloud - the idle session timeout and the transfer session timeout - which were set to 30 minutes and 60 minutes respectively. For the time being, I've set them both to 4 hours.
The second of these was, I think, killing any media (or other) upload operation that lasted more than an hour.
Following the change I was able to upload an Ubuntu media ISO (~680MB) from home over my home broadband connection. This took well over an hour but didn't fail.
The certificate problems appear to be caused by our wildcard certificate for *.cloud.eduserv.org.uk, which is fine in all the browsers that we've tested it with but which seems to cause problems for Java (and hence for the upload tool). We'll probably move to using a non-wildcard certificate to fix these problems.
Note that I'm not totally sure that the timeout setting changes above explain all the problems with uploads that I was seeing from home... but they are certainly a step in the right direction.
Hi Andy
I am seeing similar problems on a vcloud appliance. Can you tell me if you did change the certificates ( I am assuming you mean the http & consoleproxy certificates on the vcd) and did this fix the upload problems?
Thanks
A.
Note that we have now installed a new set of certificates which means you should no longer see any certificate warnings. As far as we can tell, if you are running Java SE 7 then you won't have any problems with media uploads. Anything older and you may see problems.