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Since switching from debian:jessie to debian:stretch as the base image of my Dockerfiles, I've experienced a remarkably high frequency of 503 errors on apt-get commands using the image's default URL for the stretch repos, 

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian stretch main

which I understand is Debian's official CDN. Usually these are resolved by rebuilding the instances at some later time, but are still a nuisance. Perhaps these issues are due to stretch only recently being released as stable, but into today's world of easily available high performance content delivery networks this seems surprising. Are there alternative CDN-based mirrors for debian that would be faster / more reliable? Are there AWS-S3 backed mirrors for debian sources? (Not really looking for a regional mirror since the containers could be built anywhere).

Example 503 error messages:

Get:220 http://deb.debian.org/debian stretch/main amd64 vim-runtime all 2:8.0.0197-4 [5,409 kB] Get:221 http://deb.debian.org/debian stretch/main amd64 vim amd64 2:8.0.0197-4 [1,033 kB] Fetched 201 MB in 5min 4s (660 kB/s) [91mE: Failed to fetch http://deb.debian.org/debian/pool/main/g/ghostscript/ghostscript_9.20~dfsg-3.2_amd64.deb 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable [IP: 13.32.244.252 80] E: Failed to fetch http://deb.debian.org/debian/pool/main/h/harfbuzz/libharfbuzz-icu0_1.4.2-1_amd64.deb 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable [IP: 13.32.244.252 80] E: Failed to fetch http://deb.debian.org/debian/pool/main/h/hunspell/libhunspell-1.4-0_1.4.1-2+b2_amd64.deb 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable [IP: 13.32.244.252 80] E: Failed to fetch http://deb.debian.org/debian/pool/main/h/hunspell/libhunspell-dev_1.4.1-2+b2_amd64.deb 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable [IP: 13.32.244.252 80] E: Failed to fetch http://deb.debian.org/debian/pool/main/p/potrace/libpotrace0_1.13-3_amd64.deb 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable [IP: 13.32.244.252 80] E: Unable to fetch some archives, maybe run apt-get update or try with --fix-missing?

Alternately, is there a better way to run apt to retry or be more patient about these 503 errors?

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  • from deb.debian.org : "The server deb.debian.org does not have packages itself, but the name has SRV records in DNS that let apt in stretch and later find places." So the change to SRV records would appear to be one difference between Jessie and Stretch that might be relevant here(?) Commented Jul 24, 2017 at 21:52
  • I'm seeing the same issue, albeit in a CI environment. Commented Aug 4, 2017 at 8:42

1 Answer 1

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deb.debian.org is indeed the official Debian CDN. It’s unfortunate that you’re getting these errors...

There is a CloudFront-hosted mirror which you can use, cloudfront.debian.net:

deb http://cloudfront.debian.net/debian/ stretch main contrib deb http://cloudfront.debian.net/debian-security/ stretch/updates main contrib

should work for you.

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  • Great, thanks. Will swap this into my sources.list and see if I get fewer 503 errors on the nightly image builds. Commented Jul 5, 2017 at 21:43
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    ugh, a few builds later already seeing 503 errors there too: Failed to fetch http://cloudfront.debian.net/debian/pool/main/j/json-glib/libjson-glib-1.0-0_1.2.6-1_amd64.deb 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable [IP: 54.230.19.156 80] weird. Commented Jul 5, 2017 at 22:51
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    we're constantly getting 503s from cloudfront as well Commented Aug 7, 2017 at 19:25

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