apt-get without keepalive

[Stuart Ballard <sballard@netreach.net>]

Hi,

I am having problems with apt-get which I believe are related to the
fact that my ISP runs a caching proxy server which seems to
transparently intercept all traffic sent to port 80 of anywhere. The
symptom is that the first request to any server works fine, but then the
second request receives a 400 bad request error. What happens after that
varies; sometimes the requests continue to alternate ok/400/ok/400/...
other times the requests seem to go through okay but it appears that the
wrong packages are retrived; I get size mismatch errors on all of the
packages except the first two. Other times the connection simply sits
and waits for a very long time, then (apparently) times out and uses a
new connection, which works immediately.

I believe the fix for this would be to configure apt to re-connect to
the server every time in a pure http/1.0 stateless sort of way. However,
there doesn't seem to be a preference for this. I have tried
Acquire::http::Pipeline-Depth 0, which had some effect, but not nearly
enough.

Another solution is to simply switch to ftp downloads, but presumably
there are disadvantages to this too or it would be the default.

Is there a way to tell apt to make every package a separate http
request? Or do I have to switch to ftp?

Thanks,
Stuart.