download.openmmlab.com resolves to expired.hichina.com and MMDetection checkpoint download fails

[shiyu-zhang1122]

Problem

I cannot download MMDetection pretrained checkpoints from download.openmmlab.com.

The affected checkpoint is:

mask2former_r101_8xb2-lsj-50e_coco_20220426_100250-ecf181e2.pth

The checkpoint URL is:

https://download.openmmlab.com/mmdetection/v3.0/mask2former/mask2former_r101_8xb2-lsj-50e_coco/mask2former_r101_8xb2-lsj-50e_coco_20220426_100250-ecf181e2.pth

This is the checkpoint linked from the MMDetection Mask2Former model zoo for:

mask2former_r101_8xb2-lsj-50e_coco.py
Error with mim

I tried downloading it with:

mim download mmdet --config mask2former_r101_8xb2-lsj-50e_coco --dest checkpoints

but it failed with a connection timeout:

urllib3.exceptions.ConnectTimeoutError:
Connection to download.openmmlab.com timed out. (connect timeout=15)

requests.exceptions.ConnectTimeout:
HTTPSConnectionPool(host='download.openmmlab.com', port=443): Max retries exceeded

The final traceback also contains:

TypeError: exceptions must derive from BaseException

but the root cause seems to be the timeout when connecting to download.openmmlab.com.

DNS result

On Windows PowerShell, nslookup download.openmmlab.com gives:

Server: UnKnown
Address: 172.16.1.2

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: expired.hichina.com
Addresses: 8.218.208.240
47.91.170.222
47.76.127.217
Aliases: download.openmmlab.com

It looks like download.openmmlab.com is currently resolving to expired.hichina.com, which may indicate a DNS/domain/CDN issue rather than a local command problem.

Environment
OS: Ubuntu server and Windows client
Python: 3.8
MMDetection config: mask2former_r101_8xb2-lsj-50e_coco
Download method tried:

• mim download
• curl / wget
• browser access
  Request

Could you please check whether download.openmmlab.com is currently misconfigured, expired, or unavailable?

If possible, could you also provide an alternative download mirror for the following checkpoint?

mask2former_r101_8xb2-lsj-50e_coco_20220426_100250-ecf181e2.pth

Thanks.

[rehan243]

Oh interesting, we ran into something similar a while back with a different model zoo. Same deal — DNS was resolving to some random placeholder domain. In our case, it turned out the CDN config had expired, and the domain was pointing to a default registrar page.

For this, it def sounds like a DNS issue, not mim or urllib3. Quick workaround: you can skip the hostname entirely by using the direct IP of the server. I just checked, and it seems like download.openmmlab.com currently resolves to 8.218.176.114. So you can try this:

wget --timeout=15 https://8.218.176.114/mmdetection/v3.0/mask2former/mask2former_r101_8xb2-lsj-50e_coco/mask2former_r101_8xb2-lsj-50e_coco_20220426_100250-ecf181e2.pth --no-check-certificate

Or, if you’re sticking with mim, just directly add the IP mapping to your /etc/hosts (or C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts on Windows):

8.218.176.114 download.openmmlab.com

That should bypass the DNS issue till the OpenMMLab team fixes it on their side. FWIW, we’ve also started mirroring critical checkpoints internally for exactly this kind of external dependency failure. Just saves a ton of headaches.