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I am running Ubuntu 16.10 KDE on a laptop on a wifi network that somehow forces a proxy without the need for it to be configured. Whenever I try apt-get update I get the following error:

Get:1 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial InRelease [2827 B]
Err:1 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial InRelease
  Clearsigned file isn't valid, got 'NOSPLIT' (does the network require authentication?)
Get:2 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates InRelease [2835 B]
Err:2 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates InRelease
  Clearsigned file isn't valid, got 'NOSPLIT' (does the network require authentication?)
Get:3 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security InRelease [2836 B]
Err:3 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security InRelease
  Clearsigned file isn't valid, got 'NOSPLIT' (does the network require authentication?)
Fetched 8498 B in 0s (11.7 kB/s)   
Reading package lists... Done
E: Failed to fetch http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/xenial/InRelease  Clearsigned file isn't valid, got 'NOSPLIT' (does the network require authentication?)
E: Failed to fetch http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/xenial-updates/InRelease  Clearsigned file isn't valid, got 'NOSPLIT' (does the network require authentication?)
E: Failed to fetch http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/xenial-security/InRelease  Clearsigned file isn't valid, got 'NOSPLIT' (does the network require authentication?)
E: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

Installing a package returns errors like this:

Err:12 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/universe amd64 cabextract amd64 1.6-1
  Hash Sum mismatch

I have already tried setting the http-proxy variable using my username and password to no avail. The proxy does the exact same thing.

Is there any way to prevent it from doing whatever it's doing?

Does anybody know what NOSPLIT is? (If you do, could you comment?)

This is not a duplicate of questions like these:

'apt-get update' fails when using proxy

Got NODATA issue: 'NODATA' (does the network require authentication?)

because their answers do not work.

Frankly, my organization doesn't care whether their proxy is interfering with my installing software, because I'm the only one trying to do it, so asking them is out. Also, I don't have the same problem as the NODATA issue, because wget -O - http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/trusty/InRelease returns

--2016-11-11 12:20:26--  http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/trusty/InRelease
 Resolving extras.ubuntu.com (extras.ubuntu.com)... 91.189.92.152, 2001:67c:1360:8c01::23
Connecting to extras.ubuntu.com (extras.ubuntu.com)|91.189.92.152|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 404 Not Found
2016-11-11 12:20:27 ERROR 404: Not Found.
Community
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Nonny Moose
  • 2,255
  • Okay, so I found something interesting... If I have an updated sources cache, I can just do apt-get over and over again... And then the proxy will just stop bothering me and proceed to allow the download at 200 kB/s. Does anybody know why this could happen? – Nonny Moose Dec 29 '16 at 20:18

2 Answers2

0

Changing my apt sources to https instead of http solved the problem.

My best guess is that the proxy is configured to act differently over https than over http and it did not attempt to inject a redirect into the https response.

Note that to use https over apt you must have the apt-transport-https package installed.

Nonny Moose
  • 2,255
-1

I managed to get my ubuntu VM working by following this

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AptGet/Howto#Setting_up_apt-get_to_use_a_http-proxy

export http_proxy=http://proxy.server:8080
sudo -E apt-get update
sudo -E apt-get install etc...

The key point was that I was running apt-get as sudo but setting my http_proxy environment variables as my ubuntu user

Mark
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