apt-get update getting 404 on debian lenny

Solution 1:

From a little poking around, it appears to be a problem with the Debian mirrors. According to the mirror info, lenny should be available, although you might need to change each instance of 'lenny' with 'oldstable' in /etc/apt/sources.list. However, pulling up 3 mirrors have all shown that 'lenny' and 'oldstable' are no longer listed.

Update: I did a little more poking around, and found that the USC Mirror looks to still have 'lenny' listed. Comment out your existing entries in sources.list and duplicate them the:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/

Replaced with:

deb ftp://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/linux/distributions/debian/

See if that does the trick.

With a little luck this is a temporary issue, and will resolve itself in a few days.

Update 2: It looks like this is not temporary, and http://archive.debian.org is the best place to pull packages for Lenny. Also, it looks like security support for Lenny was ended on Feb. 12th 2012, although they did release 5.0.10, a point update, on March 10th, 2012.

It would probably be worth planning out an upgrade, especially for any Internet/public facing servers.

Solution 2:

modify your /etc/apt/sources.list as follows:

deb http://archive.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free
deb-src http://archive.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free

deb http://archive.debian.org/debian-security lenny/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://archive.debian.org/debian-security lenny/updates main contrib non-free

deb http://archive.debian.org/debian-volatile lenny/volatile main contrib non-free
deb-src http://archive.debian.org/debian-volatile lenny/volatile main contrib non-free

Solution 3:

Lenny packages have been removed from all mirrors to: archive.debian.org So update your sources.list to: deb http://archive.debian.org lenny main contrib

OK - that ddn't work for me, but

 deb http://archive.debian.org/debian lenny main contrib

did