[Rule-list] another 486 update [was Re: no ppp support in install kernel?]

[Michael Fratoni]

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On Sunday 19 May 2002 05:31 pm, Eugene Wong wrote:
> From: Michael Fratoni 

Sorry for the delay answering. Things have been a bit hectic.

> I don't what it is about old computers, but I've found that my old 486
> had a difficult time installing the rpms. I even added a swap file of
> about 70 MB, and had plenty of room left over. Yet it wouldn't install.
> When I tried to do it manually, I've found that a lot of the temp files
> were stored in /newroot/var/tmp  I don't know why. I just know that
> they were.

I don't think the problem is old computers, I think your's is a network 
problem. The current installer tries to download one rpm at a time, and 
install it. If it fails, it happily goes onto the next rpm. If this 
happens with a critical file, (likely, since the largest files are the 
most important), it becomes a cascading failure. Everything else begins 
failing because the files necessary to install or run scripts don't 
exist.
If you have rpm files left over in /newroot/var/tmp, then rpm was unable 
to complete the download for that file, most likely. It could be a 
network timeout, a server refusing a connection, etc. Those files are 
deleted when the rpm command completes.

(I will add the ability for the installer to attempt to re-install 
(downloading again, if necessary) failed rpms. It's a matter of 
priorities right now, and having a new Red Hat release available isn't 
doing anything to increase my available time.) ;)

> I tried rpming one of them, and it worked for the most part, but it
> kept getting errors. When I tried it the second time, I found that the
> rpm was already installed, but it produced the same errors.

Are the errors related to failed pre or post install scripts? If that's 
the case, then a previous rpm didn't get installed. Otherwise, perhaps 
the downloads are incomplete? Try running rpm  --checksig on the files 
and see if the md5sum is good.

> If you want to test this with network installs, you're going to have to
> make it more tolerant to faults. I modified the second stage script to
> log all of the rpms that couldn't be installed, and quit no matter how
> successful the script was. I would then run ./retry.sh and that would
> move the log to ./retries.lst and then go at it again.

I'm working on it. :) 

> I think that we would be better off downloading the rpms to
> /newroot/tmp/rpms and then install locally. 

This is easily done, _if_ you have the disk space. It's a bad default 
solution, as the machines we are targeting are likely to _not_ have 
200-300 MB available to hold rpms.
You can easily change this. Just make a quick script, (or I will if you 
like) to do: 
for file in `cat pkg_list` ; do
wget http://host_ip/path/to/directory/$file
done
Then point the install script at the local rpms. I am planning on adding a 
local rpm option to the install scripts anyway.

> Also, it would be more
> helpful to copy *all* the scripts over to the harddrive. This way, we
> could stop mounting disk2. It's not the end of the world if you don't
> do that, but it would help.

All of the install scripts are now copied to the hard drive during the 
install. You will need to mount the second disk at least once, in order 
to copy the rpm binary and the second stage scripts over to disk.

> If you don't do it, I don't think that I can contribute much more,
> because I haven't been able to install it on my own. I'm not upset. I'm
> just trying to let you know what little I have to offer. I would still
> wish you well.

I hope you'll be able to continue to help. Let me know if you need 
anything else.

- -- 
- -Michael

pgp key:  http://www.tuxfan.homeip.net:8080/gpgkey.txt
Red Hat Linux 7.2 in 8M of RAM: http://www.rule-project.org/
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