Comment 6 for bug 1278589

Not sure what the bootstrapping problem is, a port server that's http only would simply:
 1) Setup the server with http_port = 80 and https_port = 0
 2) Publish an image
 3) Flash it with: phablet-flash --alternate-server si.example.net --disable-https --channel my-channel
 4) Done

The image contains a version tarball which has http_port = 80 and https_port = 0, so system-image will have the right value whenever it starts looking for updates.

If you were thinking about switching from an https server to a http-only server from the device, this isn't supported and can't work anyway as the two servers will have a different set of GPG keys, so validation of the updates by system-image and by the upgrader will fail in that scenario.