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From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040803 Firefox/0.9.3 Description of problem: Anaconda/kickstart doesn't retry after a short period of time to retrieve a kickstart file, mount a partition via NFS etc. It should try again after a couple of seconds... some card/driver/switch combinations take a short time to get the connection properly up. In particular, the tg3 driver... which has huge problems being kickstarted in RHEL 3 U2 on gigabit, but works with other cards, standard RHEL3 (no U2) or if put through a dumb 100 mbit switch. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: Install RHEL3 U2 with kickstart on a node using gigabit ethernet, a managed switch and a card using the tg3 driver on the node. Notice the inability of getting the kickstart file via http or nfs, as it's attempted before everything is OK, networkwise. Expected Results: it should fail the first time, try again after a a couple of second and get the files. Additional info:
http://people.redhat.com/~katzj/initrd-link-2-x86_64.img will be happier (also available for i386 and ia64 with the obvious name) for U2. U3 will include this fix as well.
Pump needs to try harder for DHCP too, this would solve problems with spanning trees in switches for kickstart+pxe installs
The fix doesn't seem to be in the x86_64 U3 release. I still get timeout with a dell Power Connect 5224 switch and a precision 470 x86_64 machine. I also tried with your image for i386 and x86_64 and got the request to not come in at all.
The fix changes the issues for some configurations, but it is still present in others - where U1 works. HP DL145 with procurve 2650 switches is one example... bios PXE and initial OS DHCP works, but the installer doesn't succeed at first attempt (too fast) or retry when retrieving the kickstart file. (ugly workaround: set half duplex on a switch). Various Dell nodes on Cisco switches exchibited the same problem, but not as consistently.
Can you try with the U4 beta? It should have another set of changes that improves things
U4 beta worked with DL145 last week, while U3 did not.