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I was getting some to me inexplicable behavior from apt-get/aptitude on an admittedly crusty old webserver. While it was otherwise running fine, as soon as I tried a package upgrade, after a downloading a few updates it would stall completely, then my SSH session hung (and I was unable to reconnect), thus requiring a hard restart.

First, I switched to a different package source in /etc/apt/sources.list, but still got the same behavior. At this point I was assuming the NIC was dying in some weird way... but as soon as I changed the package source to use FTP instead of HTTP, everything worked fine, and I was able to upgrade.

For now I'm not too concerned since I have an easy work around, but it implies that there's something very weird with my network setup, since it seems to be protocol (or port?) specific. I didn't think any of my NAT setup would affect outbound traffic, but I could be crazy. Any ideas what I should try to look for?

UltraNurd
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Are you maybe on an ISP connection with limited download bandwidth or throttling or a throughput limit on it? What happens if you use wget instead of apt-get? Can you monitor the traffic through tcpdump or iptraf in a second ssh session (up to the point where it dies?

wolfgangsz
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  • It's a Comcast home connection, so I wouldn't put anything past them. I've since moved this server to Rackspace hosting, so I never found the problem. – UltraNurd Dec 16 '11 at 18:52