Quoting Antony Stone (Antony.Stone@???):

> > this might be helpful :
> > https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/161866
>
> Hm, some lessons for naïve sysadmins in there :)

My _personal_ favourite part of that StackExchange page is where it says
there's a solution to that difficult and vexing problem in the
Linuxmafia.com Knowledgebase at
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Debian/package-database-rebuild.html .
(But probably that's just me.)

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