Re: 'apt update' failure, me or repository?

[Art Sackett <asackett@artsackett.com>]

For any who've found this thread by searching for the problem they're
having, the workaround is to create the file
/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99useragent and populate it with:

Acquire
{
  http::User-Agent "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0";
};

This changes apt's HTTP User-Agent string to that of a recent Firefox,
which magically prevents the mirror servers from dropping apt's
connections.

This is Debian bug #942478:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=942478