any chance you could extract /var/log/syslog when that happens so that we have a better idea of what's actually tried, and so that we get a better idea of the failure mode? If you have a near-by machine with IP $foo, you could listen using nc: nc -l -p 1234 > syslog and send /var/log/syslog from d-i to the other machine this way: nc $foo 1234 < /var/log/syslog
Attached.I first tried to access ftp.ca.debian.org which failed right away ("bad mirror" message), then switched to MIT's mirror which and it was downloading files for a while and then failed with "Cannot access repository".
Attachment:
syslog.tar.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data