Hari's Corner

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Recent Debian mirror issues

Filed under: Bits and Bytes by Hari
Posted on Mon, Sep 5, 2005 at 09:48 IST (last updated: Wed, Jul 16, 2008 @ 20:28 IST)

Of late I have been having issues connecting to the Debian mirrors for package updates to Etch. As a result, I haven't been able to update my system for the last several weeks. Now, I have been having problems with my ISP on and off, but while other sites have worked well, I have been consistently getting different errors with Debian mirror sites recently. Changing the sources.list files to point to different mirrors hasn't really yielded any results. apt-get update has been yielding nothing but error messages, which is so annoying for a Debian user so used to updating his system every two or three days. This has been the situation for a couple of weeks now. In the past, issues like this have been resolved fairly quickly, but there seems to be a drop in activity of late.

In general, Debian seems to be experiencing some technical niggles in recent times as far as updates are concerned. Other users have also commented on the fact that after the Sarge freeze to stable, Debian sid has been going through turbulent times. Some of these problems seem to have filtered through to Etch as well. Hopefully these mirror problems will be sorted out in the near future. This situation, though surprising, is quite understandable. Debian is a real monster when it comes to package maintenance and updates in the repositories because of the sheer size and complexity of the distribution and although the package maintainers are such a dedicated lot, they still have so much on their hands to take care of at their end. It's their hard work behind the scenes that keeps the average Debian user happy and content. To their eternal credit, those thousands of fantastic volunteers have kept Debian going so smoothly for years and years now. It's a real tribute to their professionalism that I have had no real complaints about Debian ever since I've started using it. Most commercial distros cannot boast of a track record like that.

So I sincerely hope that it's just me, but I have a feeling that it may not be an issue at my end. If that's not the case and it works fine for you do feel free to comment. I'll keep you updated on this issue.

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