Package: debmirror Version: 1:2.25 Severity: normal Dear Colin and co,
Before manual intervention to work around this issue, our two Debian mirrors had files debian/dists/stretch/InRelease, starting like this: -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 Origin: Debian Label: Debian Suite: testing Codename: stretch Changelogs: http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs/@CHANGEPATH@_changelog Date: Sat, 17 Jun 2017 02:40:32 UTC Valid-Until: Sat, 24 Jun 2017 02:40:32 UTC Acquire-By-Hash: yes Architectures: amd64 arm64 armel armhf i386 mips mips64el mipsel ppc64el s390x Components: main contrib non-free Description: Debian x.y Testing distribution - Not Released MD5Sum: f9bbab6d94f45e56c672017d8720a24c 1181459 contrib/Contents-amd64 Everything was working last week. This week - so after the Valid-Until date expired - a Stretch installation was reported as failing with: [!!] Configure the package manager The installer failed to access the mirror. This may be a problem with your network, or with the mirror. You can choose to retry the download, select a different mirror, or ignore the problem and continue without all the packages from this mirror. Downloading a file failed: Retry Change mirror Ignore A packet capture on our mirror showed the following transaction: No. Abs. Time TCP # Source Destination Protocol Info 4 16:52:56.197797 0 172.16.222.36 10.72.41.18 HTTP GET /debian/dists/stretch/InRelease HTTP/1.1 6 16:52:56.199388 0 10.72.41.18 172.16.222.36 HTTP HTTP/1.1 416 Requested Range Not Satisfiable (text/html) 8 16:52:56.200019 0 172.16.222.36 10.72.41.18 HTTP GET /debian/dists/stretch/InRelease HTTP/1.1 60 16:52:56.203981 0 10.72.41.18 172.16.222.36 HTTP HTTP/1.1 200 OK An apt-get update, on a different, existing Stretch installation, failed with: E: Release file for http://debian-mirror/debian/dists/stretch/InRelease is expired (invalid since 3d 15h 0min 58s). Updates for this repository will not be applied. Investigation upstream from there showed that the file had disappeared. We renamed it aside locally. Everything started working. It would have been nice if debmirror had removed the obsoleted and now seemingly harmful file. Perhaps that would be hard. Manual recovery was easy, once we had a diagnosis So I post this more in the hope of helping others with the same symptom. Our-ref: D130753 -- System Information: Debian Release: 7.3 APT prefers oldstable-updates APT policy: (990, 'oldstable-updates'), (990, 'oldstable'), (500, 'oldoldstable'), (500, 'stable'), (500, 'oldstable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) (ignored: LC_ALL set to en_US.UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Versions of packages debmirror depends on: ii bzip2 1.0.6-4 pn libdigest-md5-perl <none> ii liblockfile-simple-perl 0.208-1 ii libnet-inet6glue-perl 0.5-1 ii libwww-perl 6.04-1 ii perl [libdigest-sha-perl] 5.14.2-21+deb7u2 ii perl-modules [libnet-perl] 5.14.2-21+deb7u2 ii rsync 3.0.9-4 Versions of packages debmirror recommends: ii ed 1.6-2 ii gpgv 1.4.12-7+deb7u3 ii patch 2.6.1-3 Versions of packages debmirror suggests: ii gnupg 1.4.12-7+deb7u3 -- debconf-show failed