Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 870570
Anaconda needs to retry downloading the repo medata on a network config change
Last modified: 2014-02-05 17:51:08 EST
Selecting an installation source is somewhat difficult. Since it defaults to "closest mirror" it cannot work until the network is properly configured however once I did that it didn't try again to download the metadata. So I went in there, made sure that "closest mirror" is selected and clicked "done". Nothing. So I went in again selected "http" and then "closest mirror" again followed by "done". Nothing. Then I tried "http" => done and when I go back in "closest mirror" is set again. Finally I went all the way and set "http" with an actual (bogus) ip address and clicked done. Now I got an error (which was expected). After now going back in and selecting "closest mirror" again Anaconda finally could be convinced to try and download the meta data again which this time succeeded. I think Anaconda should: a) Automatically retry to get the metadata once the network configuration has changed. b) When the user enters the installation source spoke and exits it again even without making any changes it should retry again to fetch the metadata.
We actually don't try to re-fetch on purpose, because we were re-fetching perfectly valid repodata. However that should probably only be skipped if we don't have some sort of error state.
I've been running into this too --- it's seriously annoying if the network config isn't exactly right the first time. (And anaconda is far too willing to assume that networking doesn't need configuration, anyway.)
Please note that in TC6, network spoke was lying about network being connected in some cases (bug 871129) which should be fixed in anaconda 19.22.
Discussed at 2012-10-31 NTH review meeting: http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-qa/2012-10-31/f18beta-blocker-review-6.2012-10-31-16.00.log.txt . Accepted as NTH as this bug can be annoying and difficult to work around sometimes when making network configuration changes. However, as it touches a sensitive code path, we would like to see an updates.img for testing before this gets pushed into anaconda proper (and it'd be nice to see the patch itself too).
Because this is an annoying bug and it is not always obvious how to work around it, proposing as Final NTH.
Is this still happening? There haven't been any new reports in almost a month and there have been many anaconda changes since then.
Yes, it's still broken in F18-Final-TC3. If you arrive at the main menu with broken network configuration, the "installation source" setup fails, and it's very unobvious how to get anaconda to retry that. I tested by intentionally giving a wrong DNS server address during manual network configuration (in an environment with no DHCP service). There seems to be a different bug tickled there in TC3, which is that once you've given a bad DNS address the network spoke fails to notice a correction --- but what's being complained of in this BZ is the installation source spoke's unwillingness to retry either. Basically, none of this stuff is very willing to recover if you don't get it right the first time.
I filed the other issue as bz #889584
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