Comment 2 for bug 1389096

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.