Devuan chimaera apt is not working

You should check your DNS setup. Testing name resolution of deb.devuan.org seems to be OK today and seems not to have changed since four days.

To test your setup, use

dig +short deb.devuan.org 

which tries to resolve the name using your currently set resolvers and

dig +short deb.devuan.org @9.9.9.9 

to use Quad9. Both command should resolve the name to a bunch of addresses. If not debug the name resolving capabilities of the concerned host.

It may be better anyway to chose a mirror which is close to you instead of using the round robin mechanism of deb.devuan.org. Once chosen modify your /etc/apt/sources.list to use your new mirror server, e.g. from the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany it would look like:

# Devuan GNU+Linux chimaera deb https://ftp.fau.de/devuan/merged chimaera main contrib non-free deb https://ftp.fau.de/devuan/merged chimaera-updates main contrib non-free deb https://ftp.fau.de/devuan/merged chimaera-security main contrib non-free deb https://ftp.fau.de/devuan/merged chimaera-backports main contrib non-free 

Note: The example shows a mirror supporting https, which is preferred.

The current state of the Devuan mirror network is published every 5 minutes.

I had a similar issue with my devuan VMs. Not sure if it relates to your issue. Nevertheless I think sharing my findings could still beneficial as potentially others with the same issue would end up on this question here the same way as I also found the way to here.

For me, apt just took an ETERNITY to error out at the end (honestly I got a bit pissed as I've no idea why I need to wait half an hour just to see any useful error message):

$ time sudo apt update Ign:1 http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus InRelease Ign:2 http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-security InRelease Ign:3 http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-updates InRelease Ign:4 http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-backports InRelease Ign:1 http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus InRelease Ign:2 http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-security InRelease Ign:3 http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-updates InRelease Ign:4 http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-backports InRelease Ign:1 http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus InRelease Ign:2 http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-security InRelease Ign:3 http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-updates InRelease Ign:4 http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-backports InRelease Err:1 http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus InRelease Temporary failure resolving 'deb.devuan.org' Err:2 http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-security InRelease Temporary failure resolving 'deb.devuan.org' Err:3 http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-updates InRelease Temporary failure resolving 'deb.devuan.org' Err:4 http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-backports InRelease Temporary failure resolving 'deb.devuan.org' Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done Reading state information... Done 12 packages can be upgraded. Run 'apt list --upgradable' to see them. W: Failed to fetch http://deb.devuan.org/merged/dists/daedalus/InRelease Temporary failure resolving 'deb.devuan.org' W: Failed to fetch http://deb.devuan.org/merged/dists/daedalus-security/InRelease Temporary failure resolving 'deb.devuan.org' W: Failed to fetch http://deb.devuan.org/merged/dists/daedalus-updates/InRelease Temporary failure resolving 'deb.devuan.org' W: Failed to fetch http://deb.devuan.org/merged/dists/daedalus-backports/InRelease Temporary failure resolving 'deb.devuan.org' W: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead. real 34m56,340s user 0m0,105s sys 0m0,305s 

As I couldn't install any tools (eg dig, nslookup, ...) inside the VM, I had to experiment from my host (currently a debian 12).

To me it looked there is either some issue with the DNS entry itself, or my hosts DNS setup. But initially had some trouble until I got it.

Here the message that gave me a suspicion (see Truncated, retrying in TCP mode. at end):

$ nslookup deb.devuan.org Server: 192.168.1.1 Address: 192.168.1.1#53 Non-authoritative answer: deb.devuan.org canonical name = deb.rr.devuan.org. Name: deb.rr.devuan.org Address: 202.61.197.17 Name: deb.rr.devuan.org Address: 131.188.12.211 Name: deb.rr.devuan.org Address: 147.78.194.22 Name: deb.rr.devuan.org Address: 195.85.215.180 Name: deb.rr.devuan.org Address: 103.146.168.12 Name: deb.rr.devuan.org Address: 95.216.15.86 Name: deb.rr.devuan.org Address: 200.236.31.1 Name: deb.rr.devuan.org Address: 46.4.50.2 Name: deb.rr.devuan.org Address: 130.225.254.116 Name: deb.rr.devuan.org Address: 141.84.43.19 Name: deb.rr.devuan.org Address: 190.64.49.124 Name: deb.rr.devuan.org Address: 160.16.137.156 Name: deb.rr.devuan.org Address: 5.9.122.185 Name: deb.rr.devuan.org Address: 185.178.192.43 Name: deb.rr.devuan.org Address: 198.58.118.8 Name: deb.rr.devuan.org Address: 114.34.81.84 Name: deb.rr.devuan.org Address: 94.16.114.15 Name: deb.rr.devuan.org Address: 185.236.240.103 Name: deb.rr.devuan.org Address: 106.178.112.231 Name: deb.rr.devuan.org Address: 5.161.180.234 Name: deb.rr.devuan.org Address: 67.219.104.166 Name: deb.rr.devuan.org Address: 23.169.200.138 Name: deb.rr.devuan.org Address: 147.229.176.19 ;; Truncated, retrying in TCP mode. ;; Connection to 192.168.1.1#53(192.168.1.1) for deb.rr.devuan.org failed: connection refused. ;; no servers could be reached ;; Connection to 192.168.1.1#53(192.168.1.1) for deb.rr.devuan.org failed: connection refused. ;; no servers could be reached ;; Connection to 192.168.1.1#53(192.168.1.1) for deb.rr.devuan.org failed: connection refused. ;; no servers could be reached 

But then reading the message again I got stuck on the part Connection to 192.168.1.1#53(192.168.1.1) for deb.rr.devuan.org failed: connection refused. Heading over to my hosts iptables logs I found:

IN= OUT=enp4s0 SRC=192.168.1.122 DST=192.168.1.1 LEN=60 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=64 ID=19263 DF PROTO=TCP SPT=59566 DPT=53 WINDOW=64240 RES=0x00 SYN URGP=0 

My iptables rules already allowed UDP traffic:

-A OUTPUT -p udp --dport 53 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p udp --sport 53 -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT 

So for me, those iptables rules where the solution:

-A OUTPUT -p tcp --dport 53 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp --sport 53 -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT 

Et voilà, resolving works fine for me:

$ time sudo apt update Hit:1 http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus InRelease Hit:2 http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-security InRelease Hit:3 http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-updates InRelease Hit:4 http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-backports InRelease Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done Reading state information... Done 12 packages can be upgraded. Run 'apt list --upgradable' to see them. real 0m1,765s user 0m0,001s sys 0m0,015s 

So my guess is that the DNS response is just too large to be received properly via UDP. And indeed it is quite large as it contains LOTS of addresses. And I learned something new. Was not aware that there is a TCP fallback for DNS :)