"pump" times out -- extend a few seconds more?

[nate]

Bill-Schoolcraft said:
> Hello Family,
>
> I have a series of switches, in racks, and one of them seems to be a bit
> slow so when kickstart goes for it's dhcp request, pump times out.  The
> initial PXE takes much more time to get an "ack" at the initial contact
> than the same boxes in other racks with other switches but then finally
> starts chugging away -- it's the next dhcp request that fails, times out.
>
> Today I took the same box, draped a cat6 cable to another, less
> populated switch, and it kicked fine.
>
> (question)
> So my question is, how or where can I place an argument to tell
> kickstart's "pump" request to try longer before timing out.

just curious, what type of switch? many older cisco switches have
STP on by default, if you set the port(s) to 'portfast' the links come
up immediately rather than waiting ~45 seconds.

I'm not a cisco guy but if your switches are cisco the command
is something like

int (interface)
spanning-tree portfast
^Z
wr mem


e.g. on my old 3500s (IOS 12.0 is the latest they'll run)
int fa0/5
spanning-tree portfast

I haven't encountered any other switch vendors that have this
'feature' enabled by default. You can tell if it's on without
even logging in(to the switch) by checking to see if the link
light for the port spends a long time in the orange color
before turning green. I've been told more modern cisco switches
ship with this feature off by default.

as for extending the pump times, I'm not sure, so I can't
answer your specific question :) maybe the above will help a bit..

I did a quick search on pump timeout, and what I did see was
that it may be possible to extend the timeout by adding a
/etc/pump_device.conf and using the option 'timeout <some number>'.

though you'll need to add that to the initrd image..not the
easiest thing in the world.

nate