Debian Etch (4.0) was released on Monday, and I have to say I wasn’t at all prepared. I’ve got about 70 machines that will probably need to be upgraded to Etch at some point in the near future. I could leave some of them running sarge, but I’ll definitely have to upgrade most of these servers.
We use an apt-proxy internally, to improve apt performance. It works well, aside from a couple of bugs that cause it to lock up every now and then. While running some upgrades on out of the way servers today, I discovered that the version of apt in sarge really doesn’t play very nicely with an etch repository served by apt-proxy running on an etch server. It seems that Ubuntu is fine, and trying to update a sarge server via an apt-proxy running on an etch server is ok too.
Once the etch client has been upgraded, the etch apt-proxy works fine. So, looks like a key issue. The version of apt in sarge doesn’t have the archive security stuff in it, and has no way of checking whether the keys are intact – BUT, it still seems to care, and will timeout and eventually fail.
It turns out that installing a copy of apt from the sarge backports solves this. You’ll also need the gnupg package, but the one from sarge is OK
[code]
wget http://backports.org/debian/pool/main/a/apt/apt_0.6.46.4-0.1~bpo.1_i386.deb
wget http://backports.org/debian/pool/main/d/debian-archive-keyring/debian-archive-keyring_2006.11.22~bpo.2_all.deb
dpkg -i *.deb
apt-get update
[/code]