Aria2 problem with powerpill / bauerbill

Question

I've been having a pretty consistent problem when downloading lots of updates via either powerpill or bauerbill, using aria2c. This is especially true on my stripped down media server machine. If it needs to download 10 packages, it usually only gets about 4 or 5 of them before stopping and saying there is an error. I can keep retrying and it will get one or two more, then complain. I just keep retrying and all the packages eventually come down.
Sounds like there's probably a retry or timeout option I can set in the powerpill.conf file for aria2. I just use the default one:
Aria2Args = allow-overwrite=true continue file-allocation=none ftp-pasv=true max-concurrent-downloads=45 max-tries=2 metalink-enable-unique-protocol=false metalink-servers=45 split=10 summary-interval=0 timeout=5 file-allocation=none
Is there something I can change to make it better, like perhaps bumping up the max-tries option?

Answer 1

Save the metalink to a file using the "--save-metalink" option, then write a simple bash script to call aria2c with those arguments, e.g.
#!/bin/bash
aria2c -M <metalink> --allow-overwrite=true --file-allocation=none ...
That should at least show you the specific error. If the error itself doesn't hint at the solution, try changing the arguments. Consult the aria2c man page to see if there are any other relevant options that you can use.
Without knowing the specific error message there isn't much else to suggest.