Issue with pump, DHCP and KickStart

[Ray Van Dolson]

Hey all, I am trying to do a network KickStart install with IP assignment via
DHCP.  This has worked fine for me in the past in other environments.

I seem to be experiencing problems mentioned in the following bugs:

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=151872
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=110036

Both of these are marked as "resolved" and the solution seems to have been
either a patch or to modify settings on the switch to which my servers are
connected.

I am trying my setup with RHEL4 (latest update), and so my guess is the
patches mentioned in the bugs above have already been merged.

I can put in a request to have the spanning tree / port fast settings on the
port for the servers in question tweaked, but I'm more curious as to why this
problem is happening.

DHCP requests from pump (via Anaconda during install) time out and no IP is
assigned.  I can assign an IP manually or use ISC's DHCP client from rescue
mode or once the system is up and running to get an IP address as well without
any problem.

Why is it pump is unable to get an IP?  Could its behavior be modified to
mirror that of ISC's client?

I feel that this should work regardless of the spanning tree settings on the
switch.

I am working on getting some tcpdump output of the problem, but am hoping
someone out there has run into this and can shed some light on the problem for
me even if it's just to tell me to adjust the settings on my switch. :)

The hardware platform I'm running on are Dell PowerEdge 2950's. 

Thanks,
Ray