apt-get not happy eyeball-ed ... ugly workaround

The tool 'apt-get' has no "happy eyeball" (RFC 6555) features. That means that a bad IPv6 connection can cause long delays: a plain "sudo apt-get update" took 18 minutes on my already uptodate machine. :-(

Cause: apt-get tries each server and it takes a long time to time-out:

0% [Connecting to security.ubuntu.com (2001:67c:1562::13)]    
0% [Connecting to security.ubuntu.com (2001:67c:1360:8c01::18)]
0% [Connecting to security.ubuntu.com (2001:67c:1562::15)]    

As long as apt-get has no happy eyeball built in, there is a ugly work around:

Create a file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99timeout with these contents

Acquire::http::Timeout "2";

Acquire::ftp::Timeout "2";

Now the time-out on non-reachable (IPv6) servers only takes two seconds.

Thanks to http://askubuntu.com/questions/141513/how-to-lower-wait-time-for-repository-updates