failed to fetch Sid InRelease

[Haines Brown <haines@histomat.net>]

This continues a thread about sound in Sid, but is really a different
issue.

My copy of Sid, less systemd, was doing fine until I decided to
skype:i386 on my amd64 machine (no skype:amd64 available) and then
pulseaudio and pauvucontrol. Installing skype no problem, but I had
trouble installing pulseaudio and pauvucontrol. I discovered that
/etc/apt/preferences/systemd had these two lines:

   package systemd: *systemd*
   Pin: origin ""\Pin-Priority: -1

When I changed it to

   package systemd: *systemd*
   Pin: origin ""
   Pin-Priority: -1

pulseaudio and pauvucontrol could be installed. But subsequent to
installing them I can no longer an aptitude update or install anything
else:

   # aptitude update
   Err: http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian unstable InRelease
     temporary failure resolving 'ftp.us.debian.org'
   W: Failed to fetch
     http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/unstable/InRelease:
     temporary failure resolving ftp.us.debian.org

I didn't touch my sources list. I do not libqtwebkit4 installed.

I did # dpkg --add-architecture i386 in order to install the i386
skype. However, # dpkg --print-architecture only reports amd64. Don't I
need both architectures in order to install or update mixed architecture
packages? 

I suspect the problem is that I'm trying to update both i386 (skype) and
amd64 packages. How do I work around this?

Haines