Disable esg1.umr-cnrm.fr host

[prosku]

Dear ESMValTool team,
I'm having trouble with the esg1.umr-cnrm.fr host:

In January it was announced that this node is shut down:
"Météo-France would like to inform the community that the CNRM-CERFACS ESGF nodes (esg1.umr-cnrm.fr, esg2.umr-cnrm.fr) were shut down permanently on January 8th 2026."

Now I noticed that dataset.load() apparently gets very slow because it keeps retrying this host, with the error message: Connection to esg1.umr-cnrm.fr timed out. (connect timeout=300)

The only thing I could find in the documentation about hosts not working is (https://docs.esmvaltool.org/projects/ESMValCore/en/latest/quickstart/configure.html#configuration-file):
"If error is set to true, the most recent download request to that host failed and the tool will automatically try this host only as a last resort."

Now this "trying as a last resort" seems to be happening with my case a lot and just slows down the search.
Is there a way I can disable ESMValTool/Core from searching with that host?

Thanks!
Ulrike

[bouweandela]

I suspect that the file you are trying to download was only available from those file servers and therefore the 'last resort' is still tried. I would recommend sending an email to the ESGF mailing list to ask if these servers can be removed from the index. Alternatively, you could try using a different index node which hopefully does not have these file servers in its index or switch to intake-esgf searches (available since ESMValCore v2.14). Note that ESGF is planning to shut down all the old Solr based index nodes 'soon' (current progress here), so switching to intake-esgf may be a more sustainable solution in the long term.