Expired repository problems

[Ronald Steele]

There may be a better way to accomplish what I’m doing, and what I’m doing isn’t working, so ideas please.

I’m trying to set up FAI to work in an off-line environment (no internet access).  To this end I’ve create a apt mirror.  This works fine for a while but eventually the mirror expires and apt refuses to us it.

The config file /etc/apt/apt.config.d/10fai seems to have the lines in it required to ignore the expired mirror, but that doesn’t seem to work. The result is that nothing is installed in /target.  I’ve added to hooks to copy 10fai to /target and fcopy.log and fai.log both report the file was copied, but it doesn’t exist /target with installation stops (due to expired mirror error).

To add to my confusion, if I run task_repository from the command line, then 10fai is copied over to /target properly.  However then running task_instsoft still fails with the same stale mirror error. 

So is there a better approach to setting up an offline configuration?  If not could I get some feedback on what I’m doing wrong.

Thanks,
Ron