Seeing the cron log reminded me that cron tries to email output from cron jobs to the user it runs as. So if you don't want the emails just redirect the output to /dev/null (much as the output from the debian-sa1 job is). Or redirect it to a file so you can see it if you want.

Chris

How long did you wait before pressing the power button? I've heard of delays of a few minutes during shutdown, could that be happening here? That's a fairly easy thing to test.

Look in the BIOS to see if there are any options that might affect shutdown processing (or support for different OSes).

What make and model is your laptop? Search for reported problems with that make and model (and BIOS version).

Look in syslog etc to see if any interesting messages are there.

Chris

Try adding set-x as the second line of the script. That should produce tracing output from the script which will show what it's doing.

Chris

It's probably the program invoked by the script that's causing the segfault.

Try making a copy of the script and changing line 68 to:
echo "$dirname/$appname" "${params[@]}" -style cleanlooks

Run that and it should tell you what program it's actually trying to run. Then try searching for problems with that program (start by running file against it, that will tell you what sort of program it is).

Chris

Try:
ping -c 1 deb.devuan.org

That should do the DNS lookup the same way as apt-get does.

Chris

Could you set the clock back on the server? If it's only used as a mirror to install Linux from it doesn't matter if it has the date wrong.

Chris

Hiding the password is only useful if someone might be watching the screen (it doesn't help if they are watching your fingers as you type a password in). But it's impossible for a password manager to know if someone might be watching the screen, so they always assume the worst.

Chris

From the (CRON) error (can't fork), the oom-killer and Out of memory: messages it looks as if your system ran out of memory. How much ram and swap space does it have? What does free -mt say when it's running OK and when it's having problems?

Chris

To make it work the client needs to know what IP address vmdevuanr1 has. The server will know it's own IP address, probably as 127.0.0.1, so it will work there. The client needs to either have it edited into /etc/hosts when necessary (tedious manual work) or to be able to look it up in DNS.

What does /etc/resolv.conf contain? Mine contains:

nameserver 192.168.1.1

Which tells the system to ask my internet router (at 192.168.1.1) to resolve IP addresses. Try using your router as a DNS server as well as DHCP server. If it's already your DNS server look at it's admin screens to see if there's an option for it to resolve addresses it's handed out by DHCP. Or you may need to add a suffix to vmdevuanr1 in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/proxy

Chris

Try ping vmdevuanr1 and host vmdevuanr1 on the system you ran apt update on.
(The "Could not resolve 'vmdevuanr1'" message sounds as if it is the key problem.)

Chris

I was just pointing my browser at them, so ignore what I said. The 4 I listed showed a merged directory containing a dists directory with appropriate looking content, so I thought they were the only ones that would work. The rest appeared to fail.

Chris

My /etc/apt/sources.list contains:

## package repositories
deb http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged/ ascii main contrib non-free 
deb http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged/ ascii-updates main contrib non-free 
deb http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged/ ascii-security main contrib non-free 
# deb http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged/ ascii-backports main 

## source repositories
# deb-src http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged/ ascii main 
# deb-src http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged/ ascii-updates main 
# deb-src http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged/ ascii-security main 
# deb-src http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged/ ascii-backports main 

Checking what IP addresses we are using:

$ host pkgmaster.devuan.org
pkgmaster.devuan.org has address 5.196.38.18

$ host deb.devuan.org
deb.devuan.org is an alias for deb.roundr.devuan.org.
deb.roundr.devuan.org has address 195.85.215.180
deb.roundr.devuan.org has address 37.220.36.58
deb.roundr.devuan.org has address 46.4.50.2
deb.roundr.devuan.org has address 95.216.15.86
deb.roundr.devuan.org has address 91.121.196.103
deb.roundr.devuan.org has address 5.196.38.18
deb.roundr.devuan.org has address 130.225.254.116
deb.roundr.devuan.org has address 185.203.112.44
deb.roundr.devuan.org has address 31.220.0.151
deb.roundr.devuan.org has address 185.26.197.8
deb.roundr.devuan.org has address 200.236.31.1
deb.roundr.devuan.org has address 185.183.113.129
deb.roundr.devuan.org has address 141.24.220.40
deb.roundr.devuan.org has address 37.187.111.86

So pkgmaster.devuan.org points to one of the round robin addresses deb.devuan.org points to. So it should make no difference.

But I'm suspicious of the Connection failed [IP: 37.220.36.58 80] messages you got. And when I look at http://37.220.36.58/merged in a web browser I get a message saying The requested URL /merged was not found on this server.

Try temporarily using pkgmaster.devuan.org and see if that works. Or any other IP address that deb.roundr.devuan.org maps to.

Chris