So for the past few days I’ve been increasingly interested in getting away from Ubuntu for a handful of reasons. SUSE really seems like a great option. I love what they’re doing with Tumbleweed automated testing, the community seems great, it’s backed by an organization that isn’t solely financially dependent on the commercial success of their distro, I hear great things about YAST, the list goes on and on. I started getting pretty excited about SUSE the more I read about it and decided to make the transition.
So I went to the website and followed the homepage links to download LEAP. The link sent me to software.opensuse.org which returned a 503 error. I waited a couple hours and tried again with the same result. I waited a day and had the same issues. Through a little Google-fu I was able to identify downloads.opensuse.org and navigate through the structure there to download the distro. I settled on Tumbleweed for now and will see how things go. Processed the install and everything seems great. Booted right in and found the system shockingly snappy compared to what I was accustomed to with Ubuntu and Unity. I’m instantly impressed and I haven’t even done anything other than flip between DEs a couple times and open Firefox to write this.
The more that I read the more things direct me to software.opensuse.org to get packages. The problem is that I still get a 503 error. It’s been days since this started, and this seems like a pretty critical part of the openSUSE community so I imagine that if it really was down that people would be complaining in droves, but I haven’t seen anything about it in IRC or on the forums. I can only assume that the issue is on my end. Troubleshooting it though is where things get a little weird for me though.
I’ve tried using 4 different computers (Windows 7, Windows 10, Ubuntu, and now openSUSE). 4 different browsers (Firefox, Edge, Chrome, and Chromium), 2 different Internet connections (work and home). I’ve tried using a VPN from a nearby location, and then again from another country, tried using normal extensions such as Privacy Badger and uBlock Origins, tried using a completely bare fresh install browser, tried HTTP and HTTPS. Every single time I get a 503 error from the software.opensuse.org page. In fact I get it from build.opensuse.org as well. I live in US in the suburbs of a major metro area.
This is a pretty hard showstopper for me. Does anyone have any ideas or insight as to why this would be happening? I would love to give openSUSE a shot but I just can’t imagine having a good experience with it if I can’t access the software page. :’(
MicroFocus (SUSE’s parent company) had a suspected security breach and they’ve disabled most of the services in order to investigate:
Dear openSUSE Community,
We have been informed of a security breach of the MF authentication
system used by several openSUSE services.
As a result, the openSUSE services using this authentication method
are immediately being set to read-only mode/preventing authentication.
This includes the openSUSE OBS, wiki, and forums.
The scope and impact of the breach is not yet fully clear. The
disabling of authentication is to ensure the protection of our systems
and user data while the situation is fully investigated.
Based on the information available at this time, there is a
possibility that the breach is limited to users of non-openSUSE
infrastructure that shares the same authentication system.
Credit to Sauerland on the freenode #suse IRC channel for pointing me towards https://status.opensuse.org/ that shows this is a legitimate outage expected until at least Monday. Thanks!
I have been wondering for several days what is a happening too and was just about to post a new thread before I found this one. The best thing I could find myself was freshly announced status.opensuse.org already mentioned by other posters. I am also quite surprised nobody complained in any way for several days, since package search is not available directly.
In the meantime I used Google cached pages to find the repositories I need (I just did a fresh openSUSE 42.2 install) in this manner:
In the first search result in Google press on a little downward looking triangle and select “Cached”. As a result you can see a cached openSUSE package search results page, from which you can get the URLs to the repositories.
P.S. It would be helpful, if official openSUSE pages would provide some more information (cause of failure, estimated down time) besides “503 Sorry, the page you are looking for is currently down for maintenance.”