Tell HN: Archive.ubuntu.com repositories appear to be down, again | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Archive.ubuntu.com repositories appear to be down, again

49 pointslopkeny12ko11 comments

Archive repositories are either slow, or responding with HTTP 503, on both HTTP and HTTPS.

This is the second major archive.ubuntu.com outage in recent memory. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33380584

Was wondering why apt updates were ass-slow. I thought it was on my end for a sec. Thanks for the heads up.

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archivemirrors

Quick question. For each country there are a number of servers. If you click on the link for each server, there is someone who administers that server.

Should the users trust this administrator that he or she will not modify the original code shipped by canonical?

apt repository metadata and package data are typically verified via gpg signature (sometimes https for third party repos). Debian/Ubuntu first party repos are verified via gpg keys already stored in your system.

I've reached for this list for years. Changing the apt archive mirror is one of the first things I do on a new Ubuntu installation. I can't remember the last time I used the official archive server.

Hope I checked this post earlier... Spent an hour migrating server's zone and reinstalling OS...

Nothing has changed in years. Ubuntu should never be used in production!

I don't know. Ubuntu seems quite fine. I would install Debian on new servers. Debian is fantastic, I don't quite see what Ubuntu would bring today except support, which I don't need, but I see that it might bring a lot of crap. Particularly afraid of Snap. Debian is also almost a de facto standard on servers.

But so far Ubuntu has been reliable on servers I set up with it in the past, and repositories have always worked fine. Nothing pushes me to start a migration to Debian for them.

I am speaking from experience. A developer once killed the archive and his response about fixing it was something like "Sorry, I don't work until tomorrow morning." So, we had to switch to mirrors so that new servers in ASGs could install packages on top of based images. This was years ago and then we switched to images thanks to HashiCorp's Packer, but we also decided to abandon Ubuntu and switch to Debian.

That's not true, it works great in production and is used all over.

It works until it suddenly stops. Specifically, archive.ubuntu.com is terrible!

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