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7020100
(Get the code!)
On a fresh install this morning I got no response and eventually came back into the room and saw a "failed to fetch...". I downgraded the same computer back to the -ubuntu9 libc6 packages and used update manager to download patches again a few times. The first two times it started grabbing all the packages instantly. I stopped these downloads right away; I assume they would have worked.
The third time it took about 3 minutes of lookup for each package, even though they are only fetched from a handful of domains (us.archive.
Some of the packages could not be retrieved from the server(s).
Do you want to continue, ignoring these packages?
The errors this time were:
W: Failed to fetch http://
Could not connect to us.archive.
W: Failed to fetch http://
Could not connect to us.archive.
The fourth time everything failed, with packages failing every couple of minutes, simultaneously for us... and security... The entire time the download window shows (if the individual progress isn't open) "Downloading file 1 of 25" "Download rate: unknown". After somewhere between forty minutes and an hour I got:
An error occured
The following details are provided:
[The rest of the error message is attached; it's just failed to fetch from 1.0.0.0 for every package]
A fifth attempt resulted in everything downloading again.
It's interesting how streaky the results are. It failed for everything this morning, succeeded for the first couple dozen packages of testing this afternoon, and then failed for the next 27 packages in a row, then later this afternoon succeeded for all 25 packages. This wasn't due to network issues; firefox with ipv6 disabled worked on the same computer during the same time period.
For an individual packaged downloading it has three different behaviours: download instantly, time-out and download successfully, and time-out and fail / never download.
All together this is a very unpleasant user experience. It does not just take a long time to get the upgrades to fix the problem, in a third of my experience it failed to get any of the upgrades, and the behaviour previously mentioned, "(a long timeout), DNS lookups do in fact succeed after the delay. This means that it does not prevent updates from being downloaded", being the least common result in my rather limited experience and still didn't result in a complete set of patches.
I would describe this situation as being: Major feature (all dns resolved networking) broken after install, security feature (security updates) broken after install. Even with 50% or better of installations fixing themselves on the first upgrade, and maybe 100% fixing themselves with a persistently upgrading user who has faith that the upgrades will solve his or her problem this is still a major problem present after installing the system.