Failure to upgrade

UNIX for Beginners Q & A
1

Hi,
I'm trying a routine upgrade of my Linux system (Kali) by doing the usual:

$ apt-get update
$ aptitude safe-upgrade

That usually works fine but this time the apt-get update works as usual but I get the following error message for each file that should be downloaded by aptitude:

Err http://http.kali.org/kali kali-rolling/main amd64 bash-doc all 5.0-2
   404  Not Found [IP: 192.99.200.113 80]

And finally:

...
0% [Working]E: Failed to fetch http://http.kali.org/kali/pool/main/b/bash/bash_5.0-2_amd64.deb: 404  Not Found [IP: 192.99.200.113 80]
  E: Unable to fetch some packages; try '-o APT::Get::Fix-Missing=true' to continue with missing packages

Trying the advice

$ sudo aptitude -o APT::Get::Fix-Missing=true

didn't help.

Pinging the address works fine.
What could be the problem?

2

The server is up... but not the web server on it?

3

Typing the address in the browser gives me that standard Apache2 Debian Default page. It could be that the server is in maintenance mode.

But should upgrade packages come from that address - 192.99.200.113 80 ? 80 is the http port, right?

The domain name is http.kali.org. Indeed, a reverse lookup of 192.99.200.113 results in http.kali.org or debe.kali.org.

How does aptitude determine the ip address and port number from where to get the files?

--- Post updated 01-30-19 at 06:31 AM ---

Well, the updates started working again a few hours later.
man sources.list answered a few questions - including a lot of those that I didn't have yet.