Comment 1 for bug 1175806

I've hit this also. I tried adding a loop that just did ping -c1 ppa.launchpad.net and waited for it to succeed, but I still get the "something wicked happened" error, which is completely unhelpful. I talked to Colin about it last week at the sprint and he mentioned that he had recently sent a patch upstream to debian that would have it return an errno, and hopefully a more descriptive error.

In the meantime, the way I've been working around this in my scripts is to simply call it once without the -i, sleep 30, then call it with the -i.