Error on apt-get updating to 5.2.18

[dartrunner]

My server is trying to update to 5.2.18 but it doesn't seem to exist, getting 404 error:

Failed to fetch "forum won't let me put the link" 404 Not Found

Have tried to upgrade multiple times and have updated multiple times also. The error is keeping the upgrade from completing.

Thanks, Bob

[sysanalyst]

Hi Bob - same here. All of the 14-Aug-2018 downloads at this U R L are 404 (unable to post actual U R L's as my account is new - you can see the U R L in your APT error) . This is causing the apt errors. can only assume Oracle pulled them for some reason or another. Would be nice if they had a readme file in that directory. I simply commented out the virtualbox entries in the apt configuration files for virtualbox. I can now apply all other updates successfully. I'd advise you do something similar so you can continue to patch other vulnerabilities until the time when Oracle realizes and fixes their deb repo.

[dartrunner]

After some searching I found that this worked to let everything else upgrade:
"sudo apt full-upgrade --fix-missing"

I hope it is fixed soon, and thanks for the response!

Bob

[socratis]

There were some placeholders put in the servers on 2018-08-14 18:17 UTC. Apparently only the placeholders and not the actual files. Seems like a temporary glitch in the system.

Debian-based hosts are the ones that get affected, because the notification files were actually updated, without the content being there. I'd expect this to be fixed later today on 2018-08-15.

[3vi1]

http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualb ... _amd64.deb has been returning a 404 error since yesterday, breaking apt update for Ubuntu 18.04 users.

[socratis]

@3vi1
I merged your post with an existing one dealing with the exact same problem.

Just as an update, the files are there (https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/5.2.18/), so you could update manually if you want to. What's having problems is anything that contains a symlink, i.e. the ExtPack (without the revision number, the one that includes the rev. number is OK), as well as all the repos. They're working on it...

[Vasya Pupkin]

Came here to report the same issue. Dear VirtualBox repo maintainers, can you please fix this failure ASAP? And probably do some testing before making changes next time to prevent such failures in the future?

[sysanalyst]

It appears that the issue is fixed. Uncommented the vbox repo and apt update && apt dist-upgrade now get the latest virtualbox 5.2 update. Thank you Oracle team!

[socratis]

Yes, the issue is indeed fixed.

Analysis
The main files are uploaded first. Then, on a second upload batch, the symbolic links are uploaded/updated. The symlinks are affecting mainly things like the ExtPack without the revision in its name, and the repos.

What happened yesterday is that during the 2nd upload batch, there was a lot of traffic in the download servers that hold the files. This caused the uploaded files to get into a huge queue which prevented their "immediate" upload. Once the upload queue got processed, things returned to DEFCON 1.