The official Amazon S3 mirror is returning 403 errors

[Nikolay Kolev]

This has happened before.

[Robert C Jennings (rcj)]

Can you provide some information regarding which mirrors and what release you are trying? There are several releases which have release end-of-life and have moved to http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ from the EC2 mirrors as well in the past week.

[Nikolay Kolev (kolev)]

Failed to fetch http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/libd/libdrm/libdrm2_2.4.46-1ubuntu0.1_amd64.deb 403 Forbidden
Failed to fetch http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/i/iproute/iproute_20121211-2ubuntu1_amd64.deb 403 Forbidden

Both exist at us.archive.ubuntu.com.

[Robert C Jennings (rcj)]

I don't see failures in any regions for lucid, precise, saucy, trusty, or utopic. The rest are on old-releases.ubuntu.com.

[Robert C Jennings (rcj)]

Nikolay, Those are raring packages which reach end-of-life 27 January, 2014.

old-releases.ubuntu.com is the right mirror to use at this time since raring has reached end-of-life. You may find other mirrors that still have raring available, as you did with us.archive.u.c, but the definitive source post-EOL is old-releases.u.c. Hope that helps clarify things.

You can substitute http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ for http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu and
http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ (or http://<region>.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/) in /etc/apt/sources.list.

Also a note about raring in particular due to a change of non-LTS lifespan starting with Saucy...
Raring is about 4 months past EOL so you'll want to think about upgrading. When planning please note that the non-LTS releases starting with Saucy[1] moved to a 9 month support cycle rather than the prior 18 months you have with Raring. This means that Saucy will EOL[2] in July 2014; at this point you might consider skipping Saucy and heading straight to Trusty if possible.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SaucySalamander/ReleaseNotes#Support_lifespan
[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

[Nikolay Kolev (kolev)]

With Amazon EC2 autoscaling in place, it's not so easy to make changes to servers that were working until last week. Forcing people to switch to a newer release that comes with many differences is not a nice thing to do to people who chose Ubuntu vs, let's say, Amazon Linux AMI, just so that you can save a few dollars from your S3 bill, which possibly you don't pay anyway. Not supporting it and completely removing the packages are two different things. While I didn't expect package updates (even security ones) being EOL and I assumed the risk for that, I never expected packages to be completely removed and break my infrastructure so shortly after the EOL date.

Basically, the conclusion is: never use the recommended S3 repos and switch to main ones as S3 can only give you headaches. I understand that people should be using LTS releases, but those often are years behind and having to compile a bunch of packages is often impractical.