Distribution upgrade frozen at “flashplugin-installer: downloading http…”

1. So, it seems as if the URL archive.canonical.com is not resolving. However, googling around showed me that this error was intermittent and particular to certain geographies which is characteristic of DNS issues. So what I did was log into my work server and ping archive.canonical.com which gave me the IP 91.189.92.150 which was different from what the addressed resolved to on my other server (which was 32.1.6.124).

   Fixing this is as simple as editing your /etc/hosts file and adding the following line at the bottom:

   91.189.92.150 archive.canonical.com

   ... and saving the file. This must, of course, be done as root (sudo). This should tell Linux that archive.canonical.com actually lives at 91.189.92.150 and not to bother using DNS to resolve it further.

   Once this was done, I was able to update the package without any issues.

2. http://languor.us/flashplugin-installer-unable-download-plugin-archive-canonical-com