Description of problem: When we installed using the ISO and it booted up into the fusor-installer, I put in all our info and let it start installing. Turns out I had entered the NTP info incorrectly. Early on during the installation, there was an error message that appeared complaining about the NTP server, but we weren't sure if it was fatal or not. Since installation carried on, we assumed that it wasn't fatal. After another 10 mins or however long it took, the installation finished, and failed. It exited with an error code 6, which seemed to be an NTP error, so the error message we saw at 15% did turn out to be fatal, we just had to sit and wait for another 10 - 15 minutes to find out that we were going to have to run through the whole installation again. If that was a fatal error, why attempt to keep going, and waste our time? Additional info: Tech preview
This fits into the validation work we want to expand for fusor-installer.
Created a PR https://github.com/fusor/fusor-installer/pull/33 Details of what was done here: https://engineering.redhat.com/trac/RHCI/wiki/fusor_installer/input_verification
I think what they want is not just to validate the hostname/ip address is legit, but also whether the ntp server is reachable and working. That will be almost impossible to do before the installer kicks off and by then it is too late. We can't assume the network will be up when they are running through the menu.
Built in: fusor-installer-0.0.14-22.el7
If we're doing a check on NTP, and other important stuff that we need to get right for a successful installation, and if that check fails, stopping the install so they can go back and fix it before trying to do the full installation, that's a big step forward in my opinion. However we can help not waste users' time, like in the scenario I described above, where we got an NTP error during install, but it proceeded and didn't seem like it was fatal until it "finished" installing 15 minutes later, which was just telling us that it hadn't finished successfully due to an NTP issue.
https://github.com/fusor/fusor-installer/pull/35 the above PR was merged. Tt checks for a valid IP address or a valid hostname during the input step. When the user continues with the installation after all the inputs are complete, the NTP host check will attempt to run the ntpdate check on the NTP host entered, AFTER the network is setup. If the NTP host check fails for whatever reason (host does not exist, cannot resolve hostname, the ntp on host is not setup yet.. etc.) the user is given a prompt with the choice to continue or not continue with the entered value. If "yes" is selected, the installation will proceed. If not, the installation will exit.
Verified. "Starting networking setup Networking setup has finished WARNING!! - NTP sync host "nope" does not appear to be valid! Do you want to continue anyway? [Yes/No]" RHCI-6.0-RHEL-7-20160107.t.1-RHCI-x86_64-dvd1.iso