I’ve used the File Pre-Cache Wizard to download the required patch files into BES Server. I noticed that all the patches will show a status of “Starting download” once the fixlet is run. However, only a few files will actually start download. After a while, I see messages like “3 out of 432 retries: next attempt in 2 minutes.” began to show on the rest of the files which are queuing to be downloaded.
When I come back a few hours later, all of the files have “Failed (Retry)” statuses. When I click on the Retry link, I discovered that only 4-5 out of 20 files has been successfully cached.
I like to find out if this is normal? Is there a way to pre-cache the files quickly without user intervention?
This behavior is an unfortunate side-effect of a Windows behavior that only allows you to download two files from a single server at a time (try it in IE and you will see that the third download from the same download server will hang until one completes). This only affects people who are using proxies on the BES Server because if you are not using a proxy, the BES Server uses direct socket connections instead of url monikers (url monikers use IE code to do the download).
You have a few options here:
Wait until the downloads complete (they will eventually finish).