In the past few months apt-get update started failing when using a squid3 web cache.

It woudl give errors like these…

• 404 Not Found [IP: 149.20.20.135 80]
• The HTTP server sent an invalid reply header [IP: 130.89.149.227 80]
• Failed to fetch .../Packages 404 Not Found [IP: 149.20.20.135 80]
• Failed to fetch .../Sources 404 Not Found [IP: 149.20.20.135 80]
• etc

For ever now some friends and I have been talking about making essential packages, which would pull in all the tools that we often use on Debian. So here goes…

With the power of the equivs package, this is actually a very short procedure.

Using the ept-cache utility advertised on joey’s blog I was able to have a look at some packages on my site that are likely not on your system.

To get packages of inverse popularity which you have installed run:

    ept-cache search -t clean -s t- | less

Of interest are the following.

Debiean-heads might find it interesting that Joey Hess has produced a detailed SecureApt article on how to use security features of apt-get.

The particularly interesting bits are:

• details about the security levels put into packages
• examples of how apt-key aught to be used
• timeline that the debian pgp keys will adhere to
• problems to be avoided and symptoms you will see if you have ’em
• links to relevant documentation