Comment 0 for bug 1655431

* OS release: Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS
* Package version: 3.168.3

For the past few days (maybe even weeks for other users), update-notifier has been very repeatedly failing to handle the downloads for ttf-mscorefonts-installer. Previously it was working fine on the same system.

This seems to affect a lot of desktop users, but the issue is usually misdiagnosed on forums because it is attributed to ttf-mscorefonts-installer and not to update-notifier-common.

The issue is made particularly irritating because the update-notifier cron job tries and fails and notifies users daily of this failure.

The issue can be reproduced by having ttf-mscorefonts-installer installed, and running:

    sudo dpkg-reconfigure update-notifier-common

The error messages seem to be random but actually appear to be consistent for a given download source:

* freefr.dl.sourceforge.net: 404 Not Found
* kent.dl.sourceforge.net: Protocol "http" not supported or disabled in libcurl
* netassist.dl.sourceforge.net: The HTTP server sent an invalid Content-Range header Bad header data [IP: 62.205.134.42 80]
* netcologne.dl.sourceforge.net: The HTTP server sent an invalid Content-Range header
* netix.dl.sourceforge.net: 404 Not Found
* vorboss.dl.sourceforge.net: 404 Not Found

In all above cases, the reported failing URL can be downloaded just fine using wget.

Some other mirrors appear to work (unfortunately, mirror names are only printed
in case of errors). However, since ttf-mscorefonts-installer triggers 11 downloads in a row, chances of randomly getting 11 working mirrors are very low.