Robert P. J. Day wrote:
earlier today, i tried to do an NFS-based install onto a laptop.
everything went well, until the final (/var) filesystem was being
formatted, then the install just hung with the formatting progress bar
at about 90%. how odd, i thought.
i checked one of the other VCs -- intermittent NFS errors -- so i
started over, same kind of install. and a hang at *exactly* the same
place, in the final part of formatting /var. ok, so that's not
coincidence.
give up on NFS install, go with the local CDROM and the CDs,
partition everything the same way, and this time, i get *just* past
the formatting, at which point i get the message that anaconda is
transferring the install image to the hard disk. and then i get an
"out of space" error, "disk full?" or something to that effect (this
is from memory).
now, first, i'll assume that the NFS install was actually getting to
the same point, i just never saw it, and i never got that error. it
only showed up when i did the CDROM-based install. does that make
sense? it's sure annoying to now know why the NFS install was
failing.
Do you have a install tree or are you using a directory full of ISOs in
your NFS install method? I don't know if this would matter. Perhaps
the install tree may closely resemble the CD method? That's pure
speculation on my part.
but i'm curious -- why would i be running out of space? i partition
my setup so that i need a fairly small root filesystem, and i picked
256M for mine. anaconda certainly didn't complain about this. but
what i'm not sure about is this section in the release notes:
=====
The disk space requirements listed below represent the disk space
taken up by Fedora Core 3 after the installation is complete. However,
additional disk space is required during the installation to support
the installation environment. This additional disk space corresponds
to the size of /Fedora/base/stage2.img (on CD-ROM 1) plus the size of
the files in /var/lib/rpm on the installed system.
In practical terms, this means that as little as an additional 90MB
can be required for a minimal installation, while as much as an
additional 175MB can be required for an "everything" installation.
=====
"additional disk space is required"? where? in the root
filesystem? i could have sworn that *somewhere* i remember reading
that the install image is copied into ***RAM***, not onto the hard
drive. so what does this have with needing extra space on the hard
drive?
I recall this is correct. I haven't poked around in an install lately
but the hard drive is mounted in other partitions while the
http://www.busybox.net/ system is used to run the anaconda linux system
that runs out of the ram disk.
for no good reason i can think of, i repartitioned and bumped the
root filesystem up from 256M to 512M and it worked like a charm. so
can someone clarify *exactly* what this required additional space is
for? and if it's really necessary to allocate extra space in the root
FS, shouldn't anaconda warn the user about insufficient space in the
first place? that excerpt from the release notes is really not
terribly informative.
Perhaps a df -h would help here. How exactly did you partition your
drive. There are many debates about how to implement a partition
scheme. For example, It is suggested that all growing file systems go
in a separate /var partition. If the server is under a DoS attack and
the logs fill up in /var, then the system would continue to function
because the /var partition would act as a "fire break line." Another
practical suggestion is that /usr and /home be in separate partitions to
support upgrades. You can completely reformat /usr in an upgrade, and
leave you home partition alone.
In your case, if you do not have a /var partition, then it is thrown in
with the /, root partition. Part of the install is setting up /var
based on Linux Standards Based requirements and Red Hat's philosophy.
/var may have grown with this release.
Anaconda does perform some sanity checks. In the partitions.py file the
code checks for these minimums:
checkSizes = [('/usr', 250), ('/tmp', 50), ('/var', 384),
('/home', 100), ('/boot', 75)]
I don't know if that means you need 859M of space for one big root.
However a /var of 384 may be the answer of why you had to bump the /,
root, partition to 512. This is especially true if /var is just a
directory in /.
You may want to post a bug report in buzilla if you think there is a
problem with the documentation.
Greg
