Fix apt upgrade error when connecting to fr.archive.ubuntu.com

apt-get December 03, 2021

Recently, when trying to upgrade my tiny Ubuntu Server, got this error:

Failed to fetch http://fr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/focal-updates/InRelease  Cannot initiate the connection to fr.archive.ubuntu.com:80 (2001:bc8:1600:4:63f:72ff:feaf:a2de). - connect (101: Network is unreachable)

I thought that the issue was related to IPv6, so I disabled it:

nano /etc/sysctl.conf1

Add:

net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.lo.disable_ipv6 = 1

Run sysctl -p

Confirm cat /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/disable_ipv6 It should return 1 (disabled)

This didn’t help (also got error with IPv4)

W: Failed to fetch http://fr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/focal/InRelease  Could not connect to fr.archive.ubuntu.com:80 (51.158.154.169), connection timed out

So, after doing a ping to fr.archive.ubuntu.com and confirming it’s down, just replaced it with us.archive.ubuntu.com:

nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Finally packages upgrade is running

apt-get update
apt upgrade