By "test installation", do you mean that you have a 2018 SP3 server that you are upgrading to 24.1?  I have upgraded a few servers from 2018 SP3 to 24.1 (using 23.4 media) and total time from start to finish was around 75 minutes (+/-) and that included my note taking and answering prompts.  Package installation varied from 20-40 minutes and the Imanager and plugins install varied from 12-30 minutes.  Those were the two longest sections of the upgrade.  So I am a bit surprised that your package installation is only at 28% after more than an hour.  Hard for me to hazard a guess as to the cause though.  Fully patched before starting?  Met all the prerequisites?  What are the server hardware specs?

No, this one is a fresh installation of OES 23.4 - the aim of this test was package installation from the online repositories (using 23.4 media), and a rough estimation how much time it takes.

I haven't done a fresh install of 23.4, but that still seems long.  We are using the 23.4 media as the same starting point, but I don't know if the new install needs to pull more stuff down.  Still would be curious as to your environment.  I'm running fully virtualized on SSD arrays with decent bandwidth.

Maybe someone else will chime in with some thoughts.

I have now aborted that installation and restarted without online repos - package installation from the 23.4 ISO took about 9 minutes.

Hardware is VMware host with AMD EPYC 7502P; 64 GB RAM and 4 Cores for the VM, Fiber Channel SAN, SSD disks - I don't think there is a bottleneck here.

It seems we have problems to access the repo servers...

If I remember correct, the installer first downloads all packages, where the full download is 50% of the installation and afterwards installs the packages, but this is probably other in a new installation.

At any case it seems, that there is quite a lot lot of data to download 7 GB, if my memory is correct. The latest OES-iso has almost 10 GB of data. And the OT (nu.novell) servers have quite a limited bandwith. The best I saw, was around 5 MB/sec but sometimes I observe only 1 MB/sec, which makes downloading bigger pieces of software a test of your patience.

So, if you want to upgrade/install several servers a local SMT server or an iso is the bettter choice.

There is definitely a problem with nu.novell.com or with the connection from here (Germany) to these servers. After installing from the ISO, now zypper up is extremely slow and runs into timeouts. I'll wait and see if it's better tomorrow...

As for SMT: No, SMT 1.1 is just fine. How did that fail?

It says "Unknown response format":

This is what the SMT server sees:

xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx- - [11/Mar/2024:15:32:18 +0100] "GET /smt.crt HTTP/1.1" 200 1590 "-" "curl/8.0.1"
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx - - [11/Mar/2024:15:32:30 +0100] "POST /?command=listproducts&lang=en-US&version=1.0 HTTP/1.1" 200 112
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx - - [11/Mar/2024:15:32:30 +0100] "POST /?command=register&lang=en-US&version=1.0 HTTP/1.1" 200 112

How exactly do you specify your SMT server? Be sure you don't forget to enter the full URL like that:

  https://smt.yourdomain.com/center/regsvc

It's quite silly, but you MUST specify the /center/regsvc part :-(.

Franz has you covered there. And yes, it *is* incredibly silly.