"d-i mirror/*" does not work on presseding

a chat with cjwatson pointed me to a change:

hggdh: you might need to set mirror/country to "manual" these days, not to "enter information manually"
hggdh: but in any case, for debugging, it's best if I get a full (not excerpted) syslog of an installation run with DEBCONF_DEBUG=developer passed as a kernel parameter

So... I changed mirror/country to 'string manual' and again PXE-booted the system -- it went all the way through, no error. I will try again as it was.

I ran another PXE install with 'DEBCONF_DEBUG=developer, while having the 'd-i mirror/* left as is:

d-i mirror/country string enter information manually
d-i mirror/http/hostname string {% if iso_name is defined %} 10.55.55.1 {% else %} archive.ubuntu.com {% endif %}
d-i mirror/http/directory string {% if iso_name is defined %} /eucalyptus-integration/isos/{{ iso_name }} {% else %} /ubuntu {% endif %}
d-i mirror/http/proxy string

I got the error (see syslog attached)

This is seen while pxe booting xubuntu. as said above,
if provided with DEBCONF_DEBUG=developer, its works!

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

My PXE boot attempts are failing on oneiric with same error. The mirror/country string is set to manual, this does not fix the problem. Also tried an apt-mirror to local, still failed. Also tried the oneiric ISO mounted in /var/www/ubuntu, still failed. Two days at this, still can't PXE boot.

The failing command is:

wget -q http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/oneiric/Release -O - | grep -E '^(Suite|Codename):'

When I execute this same command on the machine trying to PXE it returns:

Suite: oneiric
Codename: oneiric

I'm observing a similar error while trying to use netboot images http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/dists/precise/main/installer-armel/current/images/omap/netboot/ on beagleXM rev C.

I initially tried loading preseed.cfg from the network and it did not work. Log is available at http://pastebin.com/jzTVG5Sf

I then added preseed.cfg to the uInitrd image but that did not work either. Logs with DEBCONF_DEBUG=developer flag is available at http://pastebin.com/yriArCPb

I'm not sure if the problem is due to my proxy but if I use an Ubuntu PC on the same network and with the same proxy, I can get to ports.ubuntu.com as shown below

@@ wget http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/dists/precise/Release
--2012-04-25 12:48:46-- http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/dists/precise/Release
Resolving webproxy.ext.ti.com... 192.91.66.189, 192.94.92.11, 192.94.92.14, ...
Connecting to webproxy.ext.ti.com|192.91.66.189|:80... connected.
Proxy request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 49563 (48K) [text/plain]
Saving to: `Release'

100%[==========================================================================================================>] 49,563 245K/s in 0.2s

2012-04-25 12:48:47 (245 KB/s) - `Release' saved [49563/49563]

I'm having the same problem when PXE-booting nodes in the latest 13.04 release of MAAS (after following the install instructions.) I can confirm that changing all references of 'mirror' to 'choose-mirror' in the file /usr/share/maas/preseeds/generic solves the problem. This needs to be fixed.

I ran into this as well on saucy. Changing "mirror" to "choose-mirror" in the generic preseed file fixed it, and now the pxe boot install process works.

I have changed the mirror to choose-mirror in the preseed file, but still i am facing the same issue

Having the same issue (same log data for us.archive.ubuntu.com with Trusty) as the OP with MAAS, I executed:
sed -i '@s@mirror@choose-mirror@g' /etc/maas/preseeds/generic

which resolved the issue.