Comment 15 for bug 556831

@Evan:
I've rolled an apt package locally with that patch and patched it in during install to see the improvement. It appears to solve the immediate general issue at hand.

Per Steve's comment though - if it's known that it will fail contacting servers, I think it would still be a good idea to try to support a preseed that skips the apt-get update step. That's still a whole minute that is lost on every system installed (30s per server; archive.canonical.com and $CC.archive.ubuntu.com). I'll attach an updated syslog with /usr/lib/apt/methods/http patched.