apt commands fail (Connection timed out) in Debian based containers on Windows
The last few years have given me several opportunities to discover the Ruby language, and its ecosystem. I am very much a .NET guy, and I had wondered for a long time what the hype was all about. Now I can see how it inspired many modern platforms (like node.js or .NET Core), but boy is the operations side of it hard! I am maintaining this very blog on GitHub Pages, which is based on Jekyll, and even a simple usage like this requires a development container. Especially as a Windows guy, although managing Ruby dependencies on Linux is a mess by itself.
Anyway, I am not creating those containers every day, but I have had a lot of trouble lately trying to create new ones, that happen to be based on Debian images (Buster and Bullseye), like ruby:2.7.8 for instance. Part of the container creation involves running apt-get update && apt-get upgrade to have an image that is already up to date. These commands would invariably fail, preventing me (or VS Code for that matter) to create the container. The errors showed many Connection timed out while trying to fetch packages from deb.debian.org or security.debian.org… And it happened with different Debian versions, on different (Windows) hosts.
Part of the debugging process was trying to reach mirrors of the Debian repositories, using netselect-apt. But the same thing happened with the mirrors. And the first step of using netselect-api was installing it, by downloading the package directly with wget (can’t use apt there 😁), thus proving that the container had proper access to Internet…
Long story short, it seems that under my conditions (Debian running in a container in Docker Desktop on Windows using WSL), and for some reason, the connections established by apt are quite unstable. The trick was to configure apt so that it retries many times before giving up: I added echo 'Acquire::Retries "100";' > /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99custom as the first command in all my Dockerfile descriptions.
That’s it. I can create brand new Debian based development containers again. 🥳