Comment 24 for bug 1664248

Tom, Andres is exploring because we're trying to pull apart two issues here.

First, MAAS should definitely be able to deploy Ubuntu even when pointed at a local mirror that has chosen to not sync specified components and pockets. If that is failing it is a serious bug. However, the data you've provided in this bug hasn't provided us with a definitive answer on this one -- there might be some odd interaction with the proxy, for instance.

If this works, then you can immediately address your use case by just using a correctly configured mirror. You don't need to set any option in MAAS-- it should just work, regardless of what is in the configured sources.list in the ephemeral environment or deployed node.

Second, as Andres is pointing out, the option to restrict certain pockets (i.e. backports) in the MAAS UI should work with Xenial (but not Trusty). This would lead MAAS to configuring its sources.list appropriately, which would mean even if the mirror was complete no packages would be requested. That facility however doesn't support excluding components (i.e. multiverse) today.

It's still unclear to me if you've isolated the problem to the first or second problem above, but that would be super helpful.