Anaconda early startup failure - traceback

[whitivery]

James Cammarata <jimi at sngx.net> wrote:

>
>On Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:54:34 -0400, Kyle Powell <kpowell at redhat.com> wrote:
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>> Hash: SHA1
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>> whitivery wrote:
>>> We have a working Kickstart server for CentOS 4.4, building
>>> targets running CentOS 4.4.
>>> 
>>> I built a new server with CentOS 5.3, to build CentOS 5.3
>>> targets, adapting for the changes I noticed as I went along.  The
>>> new server boots and runs but won't build a target unit.
>>> 
>>> When I PXE-boot a target unit, I get the boot menu and pick an
>>> entry, it starts the early part fine, loads stage2.img OK, shows
>>> a couple screens then a "Retrieving installation information"
>>> dialog/progress bar, and just when/after that gets to 100%, it
>>> halts with a traceback.
>> 
>> Looks like you need more RAM:
>> http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=19367&forum=37
>> 
>> Same thing with Fedora:
>> http://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=499585
>> 
>> Minimum RAM requirement for RHEL 5 is 512MB. I assume that applies to
>> CentOS as
>> well:
>> http://www.redhat.com/rhel/compare/
>
>Yes I've seen this same error on systems with insufficient ram (usually
>VM's).  The key is that it fails on the lspci call, which is exactly where
>all of mine would fail.

Thanks to you and Kyle for the answers - I tried another box with
512M RAM and it worked fine.  Seems nuts that hundreds of
millions of bytes of memory can't even start a text mode install.

With the box that worked, I still see some warnings in the
anaconda.log like the following - do I need some additional
kickstart settings or something to avoid these?:

  I don't need DNS hostname lookup so why is it trying?:
21:00:01 ERROR   : no DNS servers, can't look up hostname
21:00:01 ERROR   : no DNS servers, can't look up hostname

  I specified "url" so why these messages?:
21:00:01 ERROR   : got to setupCdrom without a CD device
21:00:22 WARNING : no floppy devices found but we'll try fd0 anyway

  I specified "text" so why does it say "not available" - it's
  available, I just prefer text install:
21:00:25 WARNING : Graphical installation not available...  Starting text
mode.

  What does this mean?:
21:00:28 WARNING : Unable to find temp path, going to use ramfs path

  Why these?:
21:00:32 WARNING : step installtype does not exist
21:00:32 WARNING : step complete does not exist
21:00:32 WARNING : step complete does not exist
21:00:32 WARNING : step complete does not exist
21:00:32 WARNING : step complete does not exist
21:00:32 WARNING : step complete does not exist
21:00:32 WARNING : step complete does not exist
21:00:32 WARNING : step complete does not exist
21:00:32 WARNING : step complete does not exist
21:00:32 WARNING : step complete does not exist
21:00:32 WARNING : step complete does not exist
21:00:32 WARNING : step complete does not exist
21:00:32 WARNING : step complete does not exist
21:00:32 WARNING : step complete does not exist

  These seem to be bugs:
21:00:36 WARNING : /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/snack.py:250:
DeprecationWarning: integer argument expected, got float
  self.w = _snack.scale(width, total)

21:00:36 WARNING : /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/snack.py:247:
DeprecationWarning: integer argument expected, got float
  self.w.scaleSet(amount)

21:00:48 WARNING : /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/repos.py:68:
RuntimeWarning: YumProgress.progressbar called when popped
  self.callback.progressbar(num, len(repos), repo.id)

  In addition, there are numerous "WARNING: <something> doesn't
  exist" scattered in the log near the end of the install.