maven deploy-file failed with 503: cannot find maven-metadata.xml - maven

Question

I am using Maven to integrate our project with others, maybe in a unpopular way and encountered issue.
We have a project that used to compile with Ant. Ant script is big and awesome, so when we are using Maven for integration, it is decided to keep compiling with Ant.
Now let's say Ant compile output is res-1.0-SNAPSHOT.tar.gz. (any filename can be possible but it IS tar.gz) And I am deploying the file to a nexus-hosted snapshot repository called "snapshots".
I tried to deploy with this command:
mvn deploy:deploy-file \
-DgroupId="com.my-company" \
-DartifactId="res" \
-Dversion="1.0-SNAPSHOT" \
-Dpackaging="tar.gz" \
-Dfile="res-1.0-SNAPSHOT.tar.gz" \
-Durl="http://our-nexus-ip/nexus/content/repositories/snapshots" \
-DrepositoryId="snapshots"
I have a simple settings.xml in ~/.m2 with proxy and server settings. However server settings is not being used in current progress yet, wrong passwords don't get errors.
The output is like this:
[[root#cnbi maven]# ./run.sh
+ mvn deploy:deploy-file -DgroupId=com.my-company -DartifactId=res -Dversion=1.0-SNAPSHOT -Dpackaging=tar.gz -Dfile=res-1.0-SNAPSHOT.tar.gz -Durl=http://135.252.234.142:8081/nexus/content/repositories/snapshots -DrepositoryId=snapshots
Warning: JAVA_HOME environment variable is not set.
[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO] Searching repository for plugin with prefix: 'deploy'.
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building Maven Default Project
[INFO] task-segment: [deploy:deploy-file] (aggregator-style)
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] [deploy:deploy-file]
[INFO] Retrieving previous build number from snapshots
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] BUILD ERROR
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Error retrieving previous build number for artifact 'com.my-company:res:tar.gz': repository metadata for: 'snapshot com.my-company:res:1.0-SNAPSHOT' could not be retrieved from repository: snapshots due to an error: Error transferring file
Server returned HTTP response code: 503 for URL: http://135.252.234.142:8081/nexus/content/repositories/snapshots/com/my-company/res/1.0-SNAPSHOT/maven-metadata.xml
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] For more information, run Maven with the -e switch
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 51 seconds
[INFO] Finished at: Tue Jun 12 08:44:13 CST 2012
[INFO] Final Memory: 7M/209M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
You see, it fails to find maven-metadata.xml. It is for certain, the file and its folder "com/my-company" do not exist at all in the repository.
Besides any misuse of Maven you may find, my questions are:
1) am I using Maven in the right way? (deploying tar.gz, using deploy:deploy-file...)
2) are there incorrect parameters?
3) what is maven-metadata.xml for? It is not there but Maven insists to find it -- I guess it is generated, am I missing some steps?
The solution might be stupid, I am really not familiar with Maven. Unfortunately it has to be done... Please, help me out of this.
Maven version is 2.0.11. Let me know if you want to know more.

Answer 1

I had the same problem and there was a bug in our nexus.
Using maven3 (with same settings.xml, pom.xml and .m2 repo) solved our problem and its easier than upgrading nexus.
You can check this bug also.

Answer 2

If you're still stuck with using Ant, I would recommend you at least consider adding Ivy to the picture, as your dependency manager. If I recall correctly, it was able to update maven-metadata.xml files in the repository.
Have a look at this example.