Ubuntu – apt-get doesn’t work behind a proxy

aptnetworkingPROXY

My company uses an HTTP proxy and our various Ubuntu 12.04 servers therefore need to be configured properly, namely by setting \etc\apt\apt.conf.d\80proxy to:

Acquire::http::Proxy "http://proxy.mycompany.com:80";

Acquire::http::No-Cache true;

Now, since a few days, this method suddenly stopped working: I run into sum mismatch errors. I have tried all the usual tricks found on stackoverflow or on the web, among others:

sudo rm -fR /var/lib/apt/lists/*

sudo apt-get clean

But nothing seems to work. I even switched to a FTP server, without any luck. What's a radical solution to this problem? Is it likely that the proxy server has some kind of issue? What could it be?

Using Ubuntu 12.04

Best Answer

To use apt-get through a proxy, I do the following - you do need to be able to access the internet (e.g. through a browser like Firefox) though:

sudo apt-get --print-uris install PROGRAM

This prints the urls (and other info like md5sums) of the packages needed to carry out the installation, so you can download them. For example, using supertux:

wilf@comp:~$ sudo apt-get install --print-uris supertux
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  supertux-data
The following NEW packages will be installed
  supertux supertux-data
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 59.4 MB of archives.
After this operation, 80.0 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y
'http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/s/supertux/supertux-data_0.3.3-6_all.deb' supertux-data_0.3.3-6_all.deb 58590640 MD5Sum:68bd36f2c262f7caed1b5c947977202a
'http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/s/supertux/supertux_0.3.3-6_i386.deb' supertux_0.3.3-6_i386.deb 804782 MD5Sum:a49c6c3c918bae2c968b3da6ac725b06

Then download the .deb files from the given links (preferably into a empty folder), through a browser that works through the proxy etc, and you can then install them using Software Centre; or using cd /FOLDER/WITH/DOWNLOADED-DEB-FILES and one of these commands in terminal

dpkg -i *.deb
gdebi *.deb

This is a bit slow and annoying, but seems to work over HTTP proxies. You can also get the packages from http://packages.ubuntu.com/

Related Question