no_proxy preseeding not supported

[Colin Watson]

Hi all,

I've hunted high and low for the answer to this question, through every document I can think of on the topic, and through the debian-installer sources (on Debian's anonscm.debian.org site no less) for the answer to this.

We have a exterior proxy server running apt-cacher-ng which we use for fetching package updates for all systems including the ones in the DMZ. We preseed this in the Ubuntu installation like so:

d-i mirror/http/proxy string http://apt-cache.our.domain:3142

So far so good.

We also have some corporate APT repositories for some in-house packages. These are *NOT* accessible to the DMZ, and I'd rather not have to funnel requests through a second apt-cacher-ng instance that can access these internal repositories.

APT itself has a provision for this:
Acquire::http::Proxy "http://apt-cache.my.domain:3142";
Acquire::http::Proxy::secret-apt-repo.my.domain DIRECT;

There's also the old fashioned no_proxy environment variable, which apt respects along with http_proxy (which debian-installer sets).

I don't see any mention anywhere of a mirror/http/no_proxy… where do I set this configuration parameter?

Regards,
Stuart Longland

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I don't believe there's a good way to do this right now. apt-setup is the installer component where this should probably be fixed.

In the meantime the simplest suggestion I have is to use preseed/late_command to append lines to /target/etc/apt/apt.conf. That won't cover the situation where you need to install some packages from the corporate repositories during initial system installation; if you need that then let me know and I may be able to put together a rather more complicated piece of preseeding to do the job.