Bug 13255 – clean gentoo 1.4rc2 install hangs at step 10 page www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-install.xml

• Product: Gentoo Release Media
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Description Jim Snyder 2003-01-04 13:45:21 UTC]

At step 10 on page www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-install.xml, I
was unable to make further forward progress on a clean install of
gentoo 1.4rc2.

emerge sync, or emerge rsync, or emerge -v sync all give the same result:

cdimage / # emerge -v sync
>>> Note: /etc/make.profile isn't available; an 'emerge sync' will probably fix
this.
>>> starting rsync with rsync://rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage...
(jhs: lot of time passes with almost no disc activity)
^C
Killed
cdimage / #

the system makes a few disc accesses (<5) and then sits indefinitely:
> 2 minute multiple tries, >20 minutes 1st try.

Nothing in /usr/portage after killing emerge.

This is probably a stupid mistake on my part that no one who's ever
installed gentoo linux would make, but this is my first gentoo install,
nor do I see anything on the gentoo web site as to why emerge should
stall.

The network is up:

cdimage / # ping www.gentoo.org
PING www.gentoo.org (216.110.76.37): 56 octets data
64 octets from 216.110.76.37: icmp_seq=0 ttl=47 time=68.9 ms
64 octets from 216.110.76.37: icmp_seq=1 ttl=47 time=70.5 ms

--- www.gentoo.org ping statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 2 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 68.9/69.7/70.5 ms
cdimage / # 

The only oddity prior to this was booting the i686 boot CDROM -
it wouldn't boot. However the athlon CDROM booted, so I booted
the system (pII laptop) with the athlon CDROM, then at the prompt
for keyboard/language I plopped the i686 boot CDROM into the tray
and proceeded from there. No further problems til step 10. (I was
very surprised that this worked.)

System: thinkpad 770x, 300MHz pII, 256M DRAM, 3Com 575 ether card.
Installing gentoo 1.4rc2.

Using the large CDROM images:

tarpit=; ls -l /usr/local/iso
-rw-------  1  jhs        jhs 549584896 Jan  3 16:52
gentoo-grp-athlon-xp-1.4_rc2.iso
-rw-------  1  jhs        jhs 510579712 Jan  3 23:13 gentoo-grp-i686-1.4_rc2.iso
tarpit=; 

after unpacking the stage3 tarball I have 3+G left on the root partition.

Please advise.

[Comment 1 Alain Penders (RETIRED) 2003-01-07 10:15:45 UTC]

I'm not sure if this is the same "problem" I saw, but when I did my first gentoo
install yesterday, I aborted emerge twice because I thought it wasn't working...
only to figure out it really takes a lot of patience.  How long it takes before
you get a response seems to depends on how loaded the rsync servers are.

On the other hand, the first time I tried emerge, my firewall was blocking
traffic (with DNS still working), and emerge just sat there as well.  So there's
no way to tell whether things are working and it's just being very slow, or
whether things aren't working.  Pretty confusing.

[Comment 2 Daniel Robbins (RETIRED) 2003-01-08 20:38:10 UTC]

Nick,

Is there any way that we can add an informational pre-rsync message to Portage
so that users can more easily detect a non-responsive rsync server?

[Comment 3 Jim Snyder 2003-01-09 15:57:52 UTC]

Alain's comment about firewalls explains the problem.

I didn't know that rsync used a dedicated port.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

However it might be good to mention rsync port 873 so
that ignorant people like me don't file bug reports.

Sorry, all. thanks Alain.

Jim Snyder

[Comment 4 Nicholas Jones (RETIRED) 2003-02-03 04:37:42 UTC]

Adding a reasonable timeout and message in 2.0.46-r10

[Comment 5 Chris Gianelloni (RETIRED) 2005-03-25 11:24:24 UTC]

Moving these so we can remove the "Install CD" component from "Gentoo Linux".

I apologize to everyone for this spam, but according to the bugzilla developers,
this is the only reasonable way to do this.