Docker image no longer pulls

Question

Up until very recently we have been pulling microsoft/dotnet:2.1-aspnetcore-runtime with docker on our WS2016 server (version 1607) with no issues. As of this weekend we can no longer pull this image successfully as it fails on extracting the first layer (407ada6e90de). Looking through google it looks like this is something to do with the base image being a multi-architecture base and pulling the most suitable version for our machine, and looking through available tags it looks like only 1709 and 1803 are currently supported, I also read a post stating that layer 407ada... is an indicator of the version 1709 image. Is there something i'm missing or is it likely that microsoft will have just stopped supporting WS2016 version 1609 and not updated their documentation? Is there a way to get this image on our server without upgrading our OS?

Thanks

Answer 1

If you have previous image on your machine you can push it to local repository and pull from there. Probably, its Microsoft's docker repository placing checks about the docker images being pulled for different architectures.

Answer 2

Microsoft recently moved all their .NET Core Docker images to their own container registry (MCR). The Docker Hub listings have been left to provide a centralized way of discovering these images, but the old Docker Hub image names are no longer viable. Your image in particular is now named:

mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/core/aspnet:2.1

For more info, see the announcement post.

EDIT

Actually, what I said isn't accurate. While you should still update to the new image names, the old ones should continue to work, though not all of the tags will be supported going forward. As such, it may just be a particular tag you're using that is not working any more. It's also worth mentioning that Microsoft has dropped support for Nano Server images, so if you were previously using a Nano Server based image, that will likely be a problem. In short, while Microsoft states that it shouldn't require updates to the image name you're pulling, that statement comes with a bunch of caveats. In general, I'd look into the new MCR images and see if you're somehow being affected by this, as the timing is too coincidental to be completely unrelated.

Answer 3

The reason for this was/is that while the windows server 2016 is LTSC, the image that dot net framework images are based on is nanoserver 2016 which is SAC. This means that there is no longer an out of the box image for any dot net framework in docker for server 2016 that is supported by microsoft. There is a tag that will allow you to get a version of the image but it will not be supported and updated. Alternatively you can edit the microsoft nanoserver image to use servercore and update it as necessary with releases.