Comment 19 for bug 615545

Excerpts from Noah's message of Thu Jan 26 11:26:08 UTC 2012:
> I agree with Eric and cloudcontrol, for CNAMEs being the correct
> solution.
>

The S3 solution is coming very soon, and will negate the need for these
CNAME's, so all we can do is ask for your patience.

> In the meantime, there's a problem with using any debian package from
> within ec2 instances - you can't contact the repository to install any
> packages, so using a package to fix the problem presents something of a
> bootstrapping problem.
>

The fixed package would be included in the next updated AMI's, so this is
actually a viable solution, though I think the better one is to make the
mirrors more accessible, as the S3 implementation will do.

> That includes, by the way, anything that requires apt-mirror, since apt-
> mirror is not part of the barebones Lucid AMI, and thus requires
> installation, which requires connecting to the repo...
>
> I have an alternative solution, which requires no package installation,
> and which I will be using until this problem is fixed. Rather than
> installing packages, I have chosen the simpler direct manipulation of
> the sources.list file, like this:
>
>
> sed -i -e 's/eu-west-1.ec2/uk/' /etc/apt/sources.list
>
> Change 'uk' to be whatever your closest mirror is, and you'll be running
> again.
>

You can achieve this with a cloud-init userdata section by specifying the
apt mirror. This is all that is needed:

#cloud-config
apt_mirror: http://uk.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/