The Debian deploy appeared frozen: cloud.debian.org sent this host to an
unreachable mirror and urlretrieve had no timeout, so it hung forever;
worse, output was block-buffered under the todo pipe so nothing showed.
- Stream downloads via urlopen with a 30s per-operation timeout: a dead
mirror now fails fast instead of hanging.
- Try several Debian mirrors in order (cloud.debian.org, then two
acc.umu.se mirrors) — first responsive one wins.
- Reconfigure stdout to line-buffered in main() so headers and progress
appear live even when captured by the menu.
- Add openssh-server to the cloud-init packages and a runcmd enabling
ssh/sshd, so every VM (Debian genericcloud included) is SSH-reachable.
- Add a timeout to the SHA256SUMS fetch too.
Validated: debian-11 fails over from cloud.debian.org to gemmei and
completes; debian-12 downloads fully.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Mathieu Benoit
f5923d0fbb