Fixing "Etag download for http://export.mcpbot.bspk.rs/versions.json failed with code 522" in old ForgeGradle

mcpbot archive.md

MCPBot is finally dead, and so goes with it every old version of ForgeGradle. Hope you're not maintaining any 1.7-1.12 mods anymore (or, god forbid, 1.6)! Because if you do, nobody will help you, and if you ask you will be banned from all official Forge channels. Fun fun fun. Game over.

...Or not. Someone asked ArchiveBot to rescue the MCPBot exports, and a WARC file containing a seemingly complete archive is available for download. And, these old ForgeGradle versions download mappings over plain HTTP, not HTTPS!

Some context

I maintain Ears, a mod available for too many versions of Minecraft, and it uses old versions of ForgeGradle to build the 1.6, 1.7, 1.8, 1.9-1.11, and 1.12 ports. Because reengineering these old versions of ForgeGradle is a huge goddamn waste of time.

Except, on November 17th 2021, at about 20:00 Eastern time, MCPBot died. I was attempting to release v1.4.1 and was met with the error shown in the title. So, I downloaded the WARC, popped it on my server, and started serving it. (I serve a copy direct from my domain instead of redirecting to archive.org as archive.org is very slow.)

The fix

If you too maintain retromods and are hit with this problem, add this to your /etc/hosts and watch your troubles disappear:

192.99.194.128 export.mcpbot.bspk.rs

Ideally, you would use it from my domain and over HTTPS, but this is a good quick-fix and I'm able to handle the load. (I run other services that are fairly popular.) The nature of this as pure static files also means this should never become burdensome to keep running.

I resolved this by pointing it to 127.0.0.1, I don't care if my local web server complains about it or returns something bizarre, it's going to yield an error either way and duct tape programming is what we need here.

That only resolves the issue if you have all the mappings cached already, which is likely true, but if you blow up your ~/.gradle or try to build on a new computer it won't work. A complete rehost allows bootstrapping.

The 192.99.194.128 host is down, want help setting-up a mirror on my site? I don't think my old 1.7.10 mod is going anywhere soon either. Click on my GH profile and send me an email, I have my own VPS and would be happy to provide a mirror if you're experiencing too much load.

The host is not down.

If you want to set up your own mirror, you can use the official archive from GitHub or download and extract the WARC from the Internet Archive.

re: the edit about load, I run multiple high-traffic sites and this MCP mirror generates zero traffic in the grand scheme of things. I have a dedicated server that I fully manage as a hypervisor.

Ah, I see the host is up now, not sure what happened when I tried the first time. Will take a look at the archive/WARC and circle back here afterward.

Fucking legend

I hosted the archive on my own VPS and it works fine, I would recommend mirroring the Minecraft MVN repository too.

THANK YOU SO MUCH! I was desperate trying to get a 1.8 Forge project working, and this saved me last minute.
Now, the reason I got 1.8 is because it's the lowest version for which Forge provides a convenient MDK (as far as I know), though I want to try backporting it to 1.6.4 (since I could not get Forge's Src's working). Is there anything critical I should keep in mind while attempting to backport?

@BLOKBUSTR For versions that old, you are much better off using Voldeloom than trying to get FG1 to work.