Background Intelligent Transfer Service and Amazon S3.

Question

Hi

I'm using SharpBITS to download file from AmazonS3.

> // Create new download job. BitsJob
> job = this._bitsManager.CreateJob(jobName, JobType.Download);
> // Add file to job.
> job.AddFile(downloadFile.RemoteUrl, downloadFile.LocalDestination);
> // Resume
> job.Resume();

It works for files which do no need authentication. However as soon as I add authentication query string for AmazonS3 file request the response from server is http state 403 -unauthorized. Url works file in browser.

Here is the HTTP request from BIT service:

HEAD /mybucket/6a66aeba-0acf-11df-aff6-7d44dc82f95a-000001/5809b987-0f65-11df-9942-f2c504c2c389/v10/summary.doc?AWSAccessKeyId=AAAAZ5SQ76RPQQAAAAA&Expires=1265489615&Signature=VboaRsOCMWWO7VparK3Z0SWE%2FiQ%3D HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: identity
User-Agent: Microsoft BITS/7.5
Connection: Keep-Alive
Host: s3.amazonaws.com

The only difference between the one from a web browser is the request type. Firefox makes a GET request and BITS makes a HEAD request. Are there any issues with Amazon S3 HEAD requests and query string authentication?

Regards, Blaz

Answer 1

You are probably right that a proxy is the only way around this. BITS uses the HEAD request to get a content length and decide whether or not it wants to chunk the file download. It then does the GET request to actually retrieve the file - sometimes as a whole if the file is small enough, otherwise with range headers.

If you can use a proxy or some other trick to give it any kind of response to the HEAD request, it should get unstuck. Even if the HEAD request is faked with a fictitious content length, BITS will move on to a GET. You may see duplicate GET requests in a case like this, because if the first GET request returns a content length longer than the original HEAD request, BITS may decide "oh crap, I better chunk this after all."

Given that, I'm kind of surprised it's not smart enough to recover from a 403 error on the HEAD request and still move on to the GET. What is the actual behaviour of the job? Have you tried watching it with bitsadmin /monitor? If the job is sitting in a transient error state, it may do that for around 20 mins and then ultimately recover.