As sexy and useful as the anaconda installer is, it lacks the one feature that could make the network installation process even easier. *nix installations such as OpenBSD present network installers with a list of mirrors to use during FTP/HTTP installs. Anaconda should do the same. It couldn't be that difficult.. Just another file maintained in a pernanent known location with a list of all the anonymous mirror sites and the directory that the redhat installation is in.
Marking as RFE (Request for enhancement). I'll put this on our list of possible enhancements for future releases. Also marking as deferred. Thanks for your report.
This is not something we plan on adding to the installer.
IMHO this "WONTFIX" should be reevaluated for Fedora. Fedora is supposed to be more open, so (IMHO again), showing a standard list of mirrors in the installer seems appropriate in Fedora.
If a mirror list is added to the FC3 installer, *please* make sure other FTP/HTTP servers can still be easily specified. In my case, any HTTP installs will be off a private install server, to avoid going out over the Internet with each install...
FC3 target This would force us to do a better job of maintaining the "official" mirror list too.
*** Bug 107559 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
You know, yum manages to work with a mirror list for updating massive quantities of RPM's at a time (especially with Rawhide on the current FC tests)... It actually works quite well. Maybe if some ideas are needed for the implementation, Seth Vidal might be the man to talk to... -Sean
ping
Anaconda fails when trying to download off of a http site. Between the domain name and file directory, it replicates the / so the file cannot be found. when i enter this download.fedora.redhat.com pub/fedora/linux/... it puts in http://download.fedora.redhat.com//pub/fedora/.. This is on Fedora Core 4 and 1 Another bug is that "linux ide=nodma" has to be typed for it to install correctly, otherwise it won't work on some computers.
If possible - in the mirror list I would like to be able to pick protocols. My intranet is heavily firewalled and ftp does not work. Another idea is picking the miror list through timezone/country. I am from Poland so the best first shot for mirrors for me would be those located in Poland.
*** Bug 205644 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 174073 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Now that there is the server-side GeoIP code on the Fedora download servers, maybe anaconda could be pointed at that in order to retreive a list of close and available mirror servers for the selected protocol?
By the way, now that the installer support additional repositories would it be a big task to put in the updates-repository also, so that when you install you automatically get the newest versions of packages and you won't necessarily have to update right after the installation? Now I am using Novi to update the install tree once a week.
No, that would be trivial to do. However adding the updates repo received exactly no testing before FC6, so we decided to hold off on enabling that by default until the next release. If you test this out somewhat regularly and it works for you, please let us know closer to the first test release of FC7 so we remember to enable it. Thanks.
I've tested the installation with the updates repo added a couple of times and the outcome is not what it should be. Anaconda doesn't install the newest packages, which can be seen by running yum update after the install - hundreds of packages are updated. There is still some work to be done.
Please add list of mirror urls in anaconda as a drop down menue, but also leave the option to type it by hand. I just did my first rawhide install and did it over the network. I managed to get it installed after 3rd try! First time in the middle of install (466 of 906 packages) kuduz got updated under my feet, and anaconda needed the old version to install - and only option is to reboot :( Second try froze for some unknown reason in the middle of anaconda launch. Third time I started the install from my home and realised that the piece of paper on which I wrote ftp url of rawhide I left at work :(
Now I see that this RFE is from 2001!?! Is this a such a hard thing to add to anaconda?
We actually have all of the infrastructure now so that we can knock this one out for Fedora 10. We didn't land the infrastructure in time to get all of the necessary string and UI changes into Fedora 9
Well, we are now automatically using the Fedora mirrorlist in rawhide. If you boot with the boot.iso and don't specify a URL via the command line (as in, the way most people install) then you will by default get the mirrorlist. Our mirror site attempts to sort the list such that the ones closest/fastest to you are at the top of the list. So we are effectively doing this without requiring anything of the user at all. Comments about enabling the updates repo really don't belong on this bug. They're totally separate.
How about users who booting vmlinuz and initrd.img from isolinux directory in Rawhide tree? There was no mirrorlist when to install via URL, so they still need to remember and specify a URL manually.
that's not quite right. You have to input a url to get stage2 from, which really, if you're not booting with stage2, you likely have a local mirror of it and want to use that anyway. I'm closing this given Chris' comment #21