Receiving 403 forbidden on ubuntu/dists/xenial/main/binary-amd64/Packages - unable to run apt-get update

Question

I'm on Ubuntu 16.04. For the last several days, I can't run apt-get update - it breaks with the following error:

E: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-lxc/lxd-stable/ubuntu/dists/xenial/main/binary-amd64/Packages  403  Forbidden

It seems like, because of this error, apt-get update doesn't run, as I don't see any options to do any upgrades, even though I believe some packages should've been updated.

When I open http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-lxc/lxd-stable/ubuntu/dists/xenial/main/binary-amd64/Packages in browser, it still gives a 403 error, which leads me to believe its down. However, its been down for at least 2-3 days now.

Any ideas what to do?

My version details:

$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS
Release:    16.04
Codename:   xenial

Solution 1

When there is some kind of error about some repositories, apt update will not show the informational message about available upgrades at the end, but otherwise everything else will proceed as normal. Thus you can run apt list --upgradable to see if upgrades are available, or just apt upgrade to directly proceed to upgrading all the available packages.

If the errors annoy you, you can just temporarily disable the PPA by commenting it out in your sources list until it is back up.

Solution 2

It looks to me like LXD is now part of the main repos, so http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-lxc/lxd-stable is now deprecated. The instructions on the LXD website no longer mention this repo.

I removed the repo file from /etc/apt/sources.list.d and ran apt-update && apt-dist-upgrade and LXD was properly updated with no 403.

Comments

[0bserver07]

This worked! Sometimes it might be something like this: .. ubuntu-lxc-ubuntu-lxd-stable-xenial.list ubuntu-lxc-ubuntu-lxd-stable-xenial.list.save ubuntu-x-swat-ubuntu-x-updates-xenial.list.save