Often an unattended install via aptitude will seem to hang in a terminal window. I can usually kick it by starting an unrelated HTML download in a browser. Is there a better way to keep the connection alive? Is there a retry parameter I can set globally or should I leave a ping tool running?

Guessing you have a broadband connection here. You did not provide sufficient details about your setup, so any responses will likely be as mine is, grasping the wind.

If you connect through the phone lines via adsl, and you have a dlink router, toss it and get another brand. They have a known DNS pass-through issue that seems to only affect the Linux package manager. I took them to account on this about 3 years back and it's still not properly fixed.

Thanks Mike,

I think you nailed it, I'm going through not one but three DLinks. I'm rural and my broadband is line of sight wireless 5Ghz from my ISP to an out building (about 360kbps down), through my external DLink router, 802.11G to the house, through a DLink WiFi bridge in the attic, to another DLink router on my desk. Since the internal router is static and the bridge only has an IP for configuration, I think I'd only have to replace the external router.

It doesn't sound like your external router is an ADSL unit, which are the ones I was referring to, but if you did want to upgrade it, try to get your hands onto a Linksys WRT54GL. It's much the same as a WRT54G, but the WRT54GL uses Linux Open Source Software and it has more memory, but don't confuse it with the WRT54G2. Those that use them find they're more robust than their counterparts. I find their wireless range is superb when used with no modifications, and you should be able to configure it to use an external DNS server if required to give greater reliability, so it may even be possible to use it without any repeaters and remove some hops.

I was not aware of the pppoe routers having dns pass-through issues, but as that service is not generally available in the province in which I live and work, except for a couple of wireless providers, I don't have any stats on the non-adsl D-Link routers because they are not used or favoured by the 2 providers.

We have a wireless broadband provider that recommends the WRT54GL as their first choice, although many customers elect for a cheaper units. There's only about $20 between them here in NZ, so I would call this splitting hairs when weighing in reliability as the major contributing factor.

I have WBR-1310, RJ-45 Ethernet WAN port, the ISP provides the radio uplink. Still sounds like DNS problem. I finally gave up and rebooted and restarted the install and it finished this time, but I've seem apt hang before on another box. Linksys are hard to work with since most directional antennas have rev-sma connectors.

How about setting your Linux box to use a DNS server outside of your network whilst running apt based processes.

Try the following

Primary 123.100.71.1
Secondary 123.100.71.2

If this makes no difference, then my guess is the 3 additional hops between your ISP and yourself are causing additional delays and timeouts are cutting in.

Should be easy to determine using an awesome little utility called MyTraceRoute, or mtr. See if it's available for your distro, install it ans run it from a command line as a regular user using the template below. I know it's available for Debian based distros in the standard repos.

mtr combines ping with traceroute and outputs a nice little gui window that traces the full route to the final destination and measures the time to return. Any consistent delay points will start to show in red lettering. If the red lettering starts at youe end, then the issue is related to your hardware, if it's beyond your ISP, then you can take a snapshot of the window, email it to your ISP and ask them if they can investigate it.

mtr www.anywebsite.com

Mike P