Debian is a free and open-source Linux distribution developed by the Debian Project, starting from August 1993. It is one of the oldest operating systems based on the Linux kernel, and as of now the second oldest Linux distribution still in active development. Debian is also the basis for many other distributions including Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and Kali Linux.
Debian 9 (Stretch) LTS was released on 2017-Jun-17 and it has reached it’s EOL(End Of Life) on 2022-Jul. After this date, this version of Debian has been switched to ELTS(Extended Long Term Support) mode. This a commercial offering to further extend the lifetime of Debian releases to another 5 years. But it is an unofficial project managed by Freexian and is a paid option.
One of the consequences of this End of Life status is that, Debian does not provide packages beyond the lifetime of the base distribution. And as a result of this, the once publicly available Debian 9 repository no longer exists at present.
But fortunately, we have the Octopuce for that.
Octopuce was founded by Benjamin Sonntag in 1999. And they have been providing custom server hosting services since 2005. They also provide managed Debian Linux infrastructures. In their service descriptions, they promise to take care of security and server updates. It must be because of this, they have mirrored the main repository for Debian, at https://debian.octopuce.fr
The Octopuce snapshot on 2023-Apr-23 and accessible at the following 2 URLs contains the last available updates for Debian 9 Stretch.
⇒ https://debian.octopuce.fr/snapshots/debian/20230423/
⇒ https://debian.octopuce.fr/snapshots/debian-security/20230423/
For making the Octopuce repository available for Debian 9 versions, perform the following steps…
First, let us backup the main APT Source configuration file for Debian 9.
# mv /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.bak
Create a new /etc/apt/sources.list with the following content
deb https://debian.octopuce.fr/snapshots/debian-security/20230423/ stretch/updates contrib main non-free-firmware non-free
deb https://debian.octopuce.fr/snapshots/debian/20230423/ stretch-backports-sloppy contrib main non-free
deb https://debian.octopuce.fr/snapshots/debian/20230423/ stretch-backports contrib main non-free
deb https://debian.octopuce.fr/snapshots/debian/20230423/ stretch-proposed-updates contrib main non-free
deb https://debian.octopuce.fr/snapshots/debian/20230423/ stretch-updates contrib main non-free
deb https://debian.octopuce.fr/snapshots/debian/20230423/ stretch contrib main non-free
Update the APT package index files from their sources.
# apt update
Done.