Use mirrors to speed-up ubuntu boxes

[gionn]

Hi,

ubuntu boxes come with the us.archive.ubuntu.com mirror configured in sources.list, however ubuntu support this nice feature: http://askubuntu.com/a/37754/17602

Can't ubuntu boxes simply use that instead of the default us mirror?

[juliandunn]

Sure, seems like a good idea. I would take a patch for that. If there's a way to do it via preseed.cfg that would be great.

[gionn]

It should: https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/installation-guide/i386/preseed-contents.html#preseed-mirror

However I have no idea about the syntax, since it accept a simple:

d-i mirror/http/hostname string archive.ubuntu.com

I can try later.

[gionn]

I've tried, but it doesn't work, and it dosn't return me any error, so I suppose that preseed accept only plain hostname and nothing else.

Alternatives?

[mansona]

Has there been any progress on this?

[juliandunn]

@mansona I am not a Ubuntu expert, so I don't know how to improve this. If you know, please feel free to send a patch!

[mansona]

@juliandunn sure i wouldn't mind taking a punt at this, we've fixed it in our boxes by replacing the sources.list file with the "correct" version before running anything in chef. What does your build system look like for these boxes? i.e. where would i need to make the change so that it would get automatically built in in future?

[juliandunn]

@mansona We don't currently have an autobuild system for these boxes, but I'm not sure that's relevant. Reading back in the thread, it looks like what we need to do here is to make sure the built box has a /etc/apt/sources.list with the mirror settings rather than hardcoded US servers, so we just need to solve for that, either with a preseed.cfg directive, or a postinstall script that changes those settings.

[gionn]

It's simple as putting in /etc/apt/sources.list the contents:

deb mirror://mirrors.ubuntu.com/mirrors.txt <version> main restricted universe multiverse
deb mirror://mirrors.ubuntu.com/mirrors.txt <version>-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb mirror://mirrors.ubuntu.com/mirrors.txt <version>-backports main restricted universe multiverse
deb mirror://mirrors.ubuntu.com/mirrors.txt <version>-security main restricted universe multiverse

where <version> is the codename of the release (precise for 12.04, trusty for 14.04, etc)

To clarify, this issue was created with the only objective to avoid using the hardcoded US mirrors.

[juliandunn]

Cool, so a distro-version-independent script that could be applied to all current ubuntus (need to map the version to the string) would work.

[gionn]

Maybe a dead-simple:

sed -i 's/http:\/\/us.archive.ubuntu.com\/ubuntu\//mirror:\/\/mirrors.ubuntu.com\/mirrors.txt/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

will do the trick.

[adi-]

sed returns permission denied

sed: couldn't open temporary file /etc/apt/sedJgeTJl: Permission denied

[adi-]

ahhh, nevermind. sudo made the trick!

[adi-]

btw, @gionn's response work like a charm!

[gionn]

Please note that that mirrors.txt lists even the ugliests ubuntu mirrors and sometimes I get random errors.

[juliandunn]

Doesn't seem like a great feature to implement then...?

[thasmo]

As far as I know mirrors.txt returns you the closest mirror(s) which sometimes are not the fastest. At the moment using the US mirrors for Europe really slows down the process a whole lot unfortunately.

[miketheman]

Looks like #323 solves this for Debian.

[tersmitten]

Some apt tools do not work with mirror:// (e.g. cron-apt, apt-file). This might be a problem.

[cheeseplus]

Unfortunately Ubuntu doesn't offer a mirror redirector so our hands are kind of tied here - closing this issue as there isn't much that can be done here with the fact mirrors.txt seems inadequate and the mirror:// URI doesn't work across the board.

Feel free to open a new one if someone finds a good holistic solution, otherwise we'll just have to deal until Canonical decides to set something up.