Odd issue with apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade

[Snowhog]

This is odd. I have 16.04 installed on my HP laptop and in an Oracle VirtualBox VM. In the VM, running sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get dist-upgrade is quite fast. It used to be so on my HP until I tried it today. There (on the HP), sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get dist-upgrade are exceedingly SLOW! It also appears, based on what I see on the displayed connection information, that it's trying to connect to the sources locations using iPv6 (the IP address shown are iPv6 addresses). I don't see that in the VM running apt-get.

Something is now not the same between the VM and the HP installations of 16.04, but I don't know what, or why. apt-get does finish on the HP, but it takes several minutes to do so. As stated, this odd behavior was first noticed today. The last time I ran sudo apt-get update on the HP, it ran 'as expected' without this odd behavior.

Any ideas as to what might be going on with 16.04 on my HP and what to check?

[elijathegold]

I can't say why it's happened, maybe your ISP has made some changes internally but try running sudo apt-get -o Acquire::ForceIPv4=true update && sudo apt-get -o Acquire::ForceIPv4=true dist-upgrade

If that works you can make it the default by editing or creating the file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99force-ipv4 and adding Acquire::ForceIPv4 "true";

[edit]It doesn't have to start with 99, that just moves down the list of files to process.[/edit]

[Snowhog]

Thank you! That works great. So my observation/thoughts about IPv6 being utilized were correct, or so it would seem. I do not know how, on my HP laptop, 16.04 got configured to 'prefer' IPv6 when running apt-get. I didn't tell it to do so, and it wasn't before this oddity was observed today.

I use aliases (a lot), and my update and dist-upgrade actions are aliases, so I'll just modify both to use the -o Acquire::ForceIPv4=true options.

[elijathegold]

Do you other files in the apt/conf.d that could be setting it? Maybe pulled down by an update?

[Snowhog]

I'll look at that. It is odd that this was happening on the laptop but not in the VM.