Friday, February 11, 2011

CentOS Netinstall

Me and Henry have been working on getting the netinstall for CentOS to work. To be honest this has been a big unproductive failure but onto what's happened... What happens is we go through the basic network configuration and then it asks to enter a mirror and directory. So far every time we've tried this we end up with an error saying "unable to retrieve...stage2img" Suprisingly an error like this is experience by quite a few people but it seems undocumented on forums and bug trackers (guess we're just supposed to figure it out). We disabled IPv6 because someone said it solved their problem. We don't need it (right now...) but it didn't work. The mirror we were using is I curiously went to it with /centos/ and found it didn't work even though the documentation uses it... Now we are using a VT mirror.

Our stupid mistake...

So during the whole thing we made two mistakes. One. We were using a mirror that did not contain CentOS 5.5, just some older one. Two... Before we left I tried using a different interface and it worked. I blame myself and (of course Henry!) for not catching it. We got caught up believing that the error was the symptom of incorrect syntax but we were wrong... We probably would have wasted a lot less time if it didn't take CentOS 5 minutes to tell us if it worked or not.

Pulpit rock