Consistent failure to download a GitHub release artifact in Windows CI jobs

[peterhuene]

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We've been experiencing consistent failures in our Windows CI jobs when the job attempts to use the DownloadFile task in a MSBuild project to download artifacts from another GitHub repository's releases.

An example of the failure is here.

Until recently, MSBuild would not display the inner exception message so it was impossible to determine any sort of context other than "authentication failed".

However, Actions recently upgraded to a VS version that includes a fix to print the inner exception, which in this case is:

Failed to download file "https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/releases/download/dev/wasmtime-dev-x86_64-macos-c-api.tar.xz".  Authentication failed, see inner exception. ---> The Local Security Authority cannot be contacted

With the relevant part of the message being:

The Local Security Authority cannot be contacted

On the surface, the issue feels like a networking problem with the actions environment, but I wouldn't discount a .NET SDK issue.

Interestingly, it seems to consistently occur on the third file it tries to download from the same release.

I'm opening this as a discussion as I'm not sure which repository this belongs as an issue.

[peterhuene]

It appears that this actions runner issue has some folks tracking the same problem with their CI runs.

[peterhuene]

It appears that reverting to the windows-2019 image works around the issue for now. I'm going to close this discussion and follow the above actions issue for a hopeful resolution in the future.