Comment 16 for bug 983559

I am affected by something looking like this bug even though I am on 12.10. The strange thing is that the flashplugin-installer second stage download works when updating from:
- dpkg command line as root
- dpkg command line as sudo from user account
- synaptics apply
but not from:
- update-notifier

From inside the update-notifier GUI I get the following log:
Processing triggers for update-notifier-common ...
flashplugin-installer: downloading http://archive.canonical.com/pool/partner/a/adobe-flashplugin/adobe-flashplugin_11.2.202.270.orig.tar.gz
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/update-notifier/package-data-downloader", line 234, in process_download_requests
    dest_file = urllib.urlretrieve(files[i])[0]
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 93, in urlretrieve
    return _urlopener.retrieve(url, filename, reporthook, data)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 239, in retrieve
    fp = self.open(url, data)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 207, in open
    return getattr(self, name)(url)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 344, in open_http
    h.endheaders(data)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/httplib.py", line 958, in endheaders
    self._send_output(message_body)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/httplib.py", line 818, in _send_output
    self.send(msg)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/httplib.py", line 780, in send
    self.connect()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/httplib.py", line 761, in connect
    self.timeout, self.source_address)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/socket.py", line 571, in create_connection
    raise err
IOError: [Errno socket error] [Errno 110] Connection timed out

The failing process has the following parent chain:
  /sbin/init
    /usr/bin/python3.2 /usr/sbin/aptd
      /usr/bin/python3.2 /usr/sbin/aptd
        /usr/bin/dpkg --status-fd 75 --unpack --auto-deconfigure /var/cache/apt/archives/flashplugininstaller_11.2.202.270ubuntu0.12.10.1_amd64.deb
          /bin/sh /var/lib/dpkg/info/update-notifier-common.postinst triggered /usr/share/package-data-downloads
            /usr/bin/python /usr/lib/update-notifier/package-data-downloader
and I have inspected environment variables in the last two processes, and there are no *_proxy variables in them when triggered by update-notifier.
When triggered in the other ways the variables are present.

My /etc/environment:
all_proxy=...
http_proxy=...

My /etc/sudoers.d/allow-proxy-vars-in-sudo:
Defaults env_keep += all_proxy
Defaults env_keep += http_proxy

sudo env | grep proxy:
http_proxy=...
all_proxy=...

Can someone shed some light on why this is happening?