Kickstart taking long time on RHEL 4 to start

[Brian Long]

On Sun, 2005-09-18 at 00:55 -0700, Rik Herrin wrote:
> Hi,
>   I'm experiencing a strange RHEL v4 specific issue. 
> For some reason, Kickstart is taking a very long time
> to start installing packages.  I'm installing from an
> nfs server and the ks file is located on the nfs
> server.  Anaconda quickly gets a DHCP request and goes
> through everything at a reasonable rate until it
> reaches the screen where it is about to install
> software (after it has completed the formatting).  It
> then "hangs" for about 5-10 minutes before continuing.
>  Even when installing software, I feel that it is
> quite slow.  I had the exact same setup on RHEL v3 and
> it was about twice as fast.  Furthermore, on RHEL v3,
> there was no delay in any part of the installation.  I
> checked that traffic on the network and there was
> basically no traffic except for the installation (I
> had only a single machine installing).  After taking
> some time to install the packages, the installation is
> successful.  However, I was wondering why it takes so
> long to start installing the packages.  Any ideas? 
> Thanks for your time.  
> 
> PS.  I attached the kickstart file if anyone's interested.

Another thing to consider besides the dependency calculation is the NFS
mount options.  If you go to Alt-F2 and cat /proc/mounts, is your NFS
mount rsize=32768,wsize=32768,udp?  If so, this could be your problem.

I recently submitted a patch to the Anaconda developers for RHEL 4
U2_beta that allows you to pass
"nfsmountopts=rsize=16384,wsize=16384,tcp" or any other NFS mount
options to loader.  This helps installations where UDP and large (32K)
rsize/wsize are a bad idea.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=168384

/Brian/

-- 
       Brian Long                      |         |           |
       IT Data Center Systems          |       .|||.       .|||.
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