offline tarball 14.04 still tries reaching internet during install

[Jeff Lane ]

Installed the curretn 14.04 amd4 offline tarball on a system today.

When we do this: ./add_offline_repository -u

it does at some point an apt-get update which still ends up taking forever because it's trying to reach the internet.

If I point /etc/apt/sources.list to a local mirror instead, on our maas server, then it works fine.

This did not happen yesterday when doing this on another machine using the 14.04.1 tarball and I'm not sure why, AIUI the scripts are the same. Maybe there was an environmental difference.

in any case, perhaps this should move sources.list to sources.list.backup and create a new sources.list that ONLY includes the local repository data.

[Daniel Manrique (roadmr)]

Maybe their network configurations were different?

Yes, well, I don't disable network access or remove existing sources, so the apt-get update command will experience long timeouts if the machine thinks it has a network (maybe when you installed it it was connected?) but isn't actually plugged in.

Could you tell me if this was the case?

I'd prefer not to completely move away the user's source files, but if that's the best option I'll certainly consider it.

[Jeff Lane  (bladernr)]

Yeah, this was on a system with no outside network access. So manually installed via USB and then we put the tarball on from USB stick as well. The only network access is on a private switch to the iperf target.

Maybe some intelligence to do a quick network check like "ping archive.ubuntu.com" and if that works, then use local source and if not then use something else?

It's a minor point, the problem is that the default sources.list when installed manually is quite long and the requests will all have to time out, meaning installing from the "offline" tarball could take 30 minutes or more depending on how long apt-get takes to timeout each requiest to the archive or security or extras.ubuntu.

To be honest, this is kind of a corner case, but the point of the tarball is for those corner cases where internet is not accessible. If there's internet access, there's really no need for the tarball a we can just install from PPA directly at that point.