Hi folks, > I also tried to prevent the "negatiation" from happening by passing > "Accept-Encoding: identity" in the HTTP request using wget, but that > didn't help
I just realized that this is not about Accept-Encoding, but the "Accept:" header. If apt would send an Accept: text/plain header, the mirror replies with 406 Not Acceptable instead. matthijs@grubby:~$ wget -O /dev/null --header='Accept: text/plain' --server-response http://ftp.ch.debian.org/mirror/debian/dists/wheezy/main/i18n/Translation-en --2012-01-27 22:50:32-- http://ftp.ch.debian.org/mirror/debian/dists/wheezy/main/i18n/Translation-en Resolving ftp.ch.debian.org (ftp.ch.debian.org)... 129.132.86.210 Connecting to ftp.ch.debian.org (ftp.ch.debian.org)|129.132.86.210|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... HTTP/1.1 406 Not Acceptable Date: Fri, 27 Jan 2012 21:50:32 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.16 (Debian) Alternates: {"Translation-en.bz2" 1 {type application/x-bzip2} {length 3700790}} Vary: negotiate TCN: list Content-Length: 504 Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 2012-01-27 22:50:32 ERROR 406: Not Acceptable. Note sure what sending an Accept header does to other mirrors, though. It seems Apache ignores it normally (happily returning application/x-bzip2 when you Accept: text/plain only, if you use a .bz2 url). Only when multiviews are enabled and the url does not have an extension, Apache looks at the Accept header (Disclaimer: I haven't looked into Apache documentation and did a short test with a sample size of 1, so please verify this). In any case, sending the mime type you except in the Accept header should just work for compliant HTTP servers. Alternatively, just sending the Accept headers for the uncompressed case could make sense too. Gr. Matthijs
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