Comment 8 for bug 932088

We worked that around by adding retries for apt-get operations with exponential backoff and eventual abort after 6 retries (64s wait last time). Of 51 instances which were launched since that fix was deployed, 18 had retries kick in. And 10 still failed in the end (i.e. after 6 retries). However, all failures were in "apt-get update", not "apt-get install". The actual failures were like:

W: Failed to fetch http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com.s3.amazonaws.com/ubuntu/dists/natty-updates/main/binary-amd64/Packages 403 Forbidden

In other words, we came back to same issue which we had with original EC2 mirror - weird 403 errors. However, I'm still getting 403 on that URL now, so maybe not all of those errors are really random, maybe there's indeed permission problems, or 403 is misreported for absent files or something.