Can't connect to Linux update server using apt-get

Question

I am running Lubuntu 15.04 in VirtualBox and suddenly when I use the apt-get command it is unable to connect to the server I have been using for downloads (ubuntuarchive.mirror.nac.net). The problem has persisted for several days but I was previously able to install through sudo apt-get. Any suggestions?

The error message I get when I try to run sudo apt-get update is versions of this for every package:

Failed to fetch http://ubuntuarchive.mirror.nac.net/dists/wily/Release.gpg Unable to connect to ubuntuarchive.mirror.nac.net:http:

Solution

Most likely that mirror is dead. It makes sense since Ubuntu 15.10 was end-of-lifed on July 28, 2016. Meaning no more patches and no more upgrades. Your best and most solid bet is to moving to an LTS of Ubuntu such as Ubuntu 16.04; or Lubuntu 16.04 in your case.

But if you want to get a final round of patches in place, you can change your sources.list to point to the Ubuntu old-releases archive. Instructions can be found here.

First, back up your sources.list like this:

sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.BACKUP

Then open up your sources.list file like this:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

And replace the contents with this:

## EOL upgrade sources.list
# Required
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ wily main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ wily-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ wily-security main restricted universe multiverse

# Optional
#deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ wily-backports main restricted universe multiverse

And then run update like this:

sudo apt-get update

And when that is done, you should be set… In some way.

But honestly, you should upgrade to 16.04 LTS to get out of this mess.

Comments

[sleske]

Did you perform the usual networking troubleshooting steps? Connect from outside the VM, connect from inside the VM using curl or ping, test DNS lookup, etc., etc...