Comment 3 for bug 494185

Scott: While we wait for (or work on) new images which do not have this problem, the major pain could be eliminated by asking the IS team to open up the restrictions on us.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com so that it can be accessed from us-west-1. I don't expect it would cost that much given the fairly low cost of network traffic is on EC2, fairly small volume of each update, and fairly low usage of us-west-1 at this point.

The alternative is that every user who tries an official Ubuntu AMI on us-west-1 is unable to upgrade unless they happen to find this bug report with the workaround.