Okay, I've found out some other stuff which may help. The local mirror is using apt-proxy, and I've been going through the log file from that. It seems the packages are not being returned because the request is getting an IMS miss. That's fair enough, you don't want it to return stuff that isn't modified. But here's the clinker:
The IMS time apt-get is requesting is the last modified time on the /var/state/apt/lists/ file, which is being updated each run! So apt-get hits apt-proxy at 12:55 pm and says "give me the package file if it's been modified since 10:50 am today" (10:50 am being the last run I scheduled with an at job since I was out of the office). apt-proxy checks remote, checks local, says "nope, it hasn't been modified since then" even though the actual local client Package file is now four days old (contents-wise) I'm going to touch all those files with a really old date and try another run. That should work, but I'm curious now why the files are getting touched each run. -- Matt
