Re: failed to fetch Sid InRelease

[Haines Brown <haines@histomat.net>]

On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 09:28:34AM -0500, Haines Brown wrote:

My question remains unanswered: on a Sid machine lacking systemd,
after an installation of pulseaudio and pavucontrol, 
aptitude or apt-get connects to sever but fails to fetch from
ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/unstable/InRelease 
The reason is a temporary failure to resolve ftp.us.debian.org

  $ uname -a
  Linux thinkpad 4.0.0-2-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.0.7-1 (2015-07-06) x86_64 \
  GNU/Linux 

I had added i386 to my amd64 machine to install skype:i386. So now

  $ dpkg --print-foreign-architectures
  i386.

I ran  $ dpkg-query -s on apt and aptitude, and status of both is
install ok installed.

The problem:

  $ LANG=C;sudo apt-get update -o APT::Cache-Limit=100000000 &&   \
        sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
    0% [Connecting to ftp.us.debian.org]
    Err:1 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian unstable InRelease
      Temporary failure resolving 'ftp.us.debian.org'
    Reading package lists... Done
    W: Failed to fetch  \
       http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/unstable/InRelease \
       Temporary filure resolving 'ftp.us.debian.org'
    W: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored,
       or old ones used instead.

Changing debian packages repository did not help.

Doing the following did not help. Running apt-get update just restored
the lock in the former location.

  # rm /var/lib/apt/lists/lock
  # rm /var/cache/apt/archives/lock

There is a /var/lib/apt/partial directory owned by _apt. I assume this
and the lock are artifacts of apt-get not finishing the
update. Desperate I tried without luck:

   # adduser --force-badname --system -home /var/empty --no-create-home \
   --quiet _apt

But _apt exists in passwd:

   # cat /etc/passwd | grep apt
   _apt:x:116:65534::/nonexistent:/bin/false

Commenting dpkg-preconfigure did not help. 

I find that the /var/lib/dpkg/available and available-old files are
missing. I find that the /var/cache/apt/archives/ directory has a lock
file and an empty partial subdirectory, but contains no .deb files.

With a viable dpkg and apt and internet connection, there must be some
elemental way around this (wget?), but I'm too ignorant to figure it
out. Perhaps I have to re-install Sid.

Haines Brown