If you look in the mirror and you say his name 5 times, he'll appear behind you breathing down your neck. - Candyman
If only troubleshooting mirrors was so simple. Have you ever been running a build or an install which stalls at the provisioning step, with a message like:
[INFO] Fetching org.eclipse.birt.integration.wtp.ui_2.6.0.v20100617-1315.jar.pack.gz (4.3MB of 46.13MB at 171.56kB/s) from http://mirrors.xmission.com/eclipse/birt/update-site/2.6/plugins/org.eclipse.birt.integration.wtp.ui_2.6.0.v20100617-1315.jar.pack.gz
The solution here is often simply to force p2 to pick a specific mirror rather than letting it choose any mirror it wants.
How, you ask?
Well, assuming you were polling this site looking for artifacts to install or update...
http://download.eclipse.org/birt/update-site/2.6/
... you would then change that URL to this, and look at the list of available mirrors:
http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/birt/update-site/2.6/
Now it's a trivial matter to select a mirror that's close to you and try that instead of the download.eclipse.org mirror, such as:
ftp://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/eclipse/birt/update-site/2.6/
If you're running a Tycho build, this URL should be changed in your parent-pom.xml ...
<url>http://download.eclipse.org/birt/update-site/2.6/</url>
... or your .target platform file, depending on which way you're building.
<repository location="http://download.eclipse.org/birt/update-site/2.6/"/>
If you rely on a parent-pom.xml, make sure you're activating the profile with the revised URL...
mvn3 clean install -U -B -fae -Phelios
... or, if you're building against a .target platform file, make sure you update the URL in that file, and that your build points to the profile which will load the .target file.
mvn3 clean install -U -B -fae -P!helios,helios-no-target
UPDATE, 2010/08/11: Forgot to mention that there are a number of p2 update site zips available here to help with your offsite mirroring: http://download.eclipse.org/athena/repos/.
