Comment 9 for bug 556831

On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 11:25:29PM -0000, Mario Limonciello wrote:
> If there isn't a good way to be able to gracefully work from this
> scenario (in the past I think the timeouts were just a lot lower),

The timeouts were raised recently to address a different problem:

apt-setup (1:0.42ubuntu1) lucid; urgency=low
[...]
  * Increase the mirror verification timeout to 30 seconds, now that this
    operation is cancellable. Some people (hi, Ara) seem to have trouble
    getting mirror responses in 10 seconds.
[...]
 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:46:22 +0000

However, if this was the only relevant change, then you'd still have
been seeing a delay on the order of 20 minutes, and I'm guessing you
wouldn't have been too happy about that either! Thus, I don't think
mere timeout changes are responsible for this bug.

> then it would be preferable to support an optional preseed template to
> tell it to not try to verify any sources written to sources.list.

We already don't verify any sources by default. The 'apt-get update'
run is not for verification, but to make it possible to install packages
from those sources.

While it's not out of the question to come up with some kind of
workaround, this is going to affect many more people than just Dell,
many of whom aren't going to be familiar with preseeding, and so I'd
much rather we made it behave more sensibly by default - particularly
since we did that for 8.04 LTS and it seems to have regressed.