Hmmmm .... curious.

When I was having problems getting ceres to update, because of the system clock issue, I typed "apt-cache search ntp".  It came back with nothing.  Now the search comes back with a lot of things, including ntp.  Perhaps the aborted update messed up the available package listing.

As an aside, I don't actually need ntp for the virtual machine.  I just forgot to click the box in the machine settings for how to handle the hardware clock from the host.  This had not been causing any problems with updating until a few days ago.

To my understanding; If you hadn't been able to pull the package lists (apt update), then apt-cache wouldn't have had anything to search. Once you corrected the clock, I bet you ran and apt update which would've pulled down all the package lists and now apt-cache has stuff to search.

When I was having problems getting ceres to update, because of the system clock issue, I typed "apt-cache search ntp".  It came back with nothing.  Now the search comes back with a lot of things, including ntp.  Perhaps the aborted update messed up the available package listing.

As an aside, I don't actually need ntp for the virtual machine.  I just forgot to click the box in the machine settings for how to handle the hardware clock from the host.  This had not been causing any problems with updating until a few days ago.

There are NO ntp utilities in ceres!

https://pkginfo.devuan.org/stage/ceres/ … fsg-2.html?

I figured out what you meant.  It was the system time on the virtual machine.  It was way off.  I fixed it and everything worked fine again.

There are NO ntp utilities in ceres!

Get:1 http://deb.devuan.org/merged ceres InRelease [25.6 kB]
Reading package lists... Done       
E: Release file for http://deb.devuan.org/merged/dists/ceres/InRelease is not valid yet (invalid for another 4h 19min 45s). Updates for this repository will not be applied.

The length of time the InRelease file is still invalid varies among my different attempts, but the result is the same.

I was originally using unstable in my sources.list file when this started.  I tried changing it back to ceres, but, as your can see, it had no effect.