Package: debian-installer Version: 20090123lenny1 hi, the debian-installer seems to assume that the network is usable as soon as the link comes up, which may not be the case if the 802.1d spanning tree protocol is in use, in which case it can be up to ~30 seconds before the switch port will forward ethernet frames. i've noticed that trying to preseed a network install on a machine attached to an STP-enabled switch usually fails since as soon as the network link is up, d-i attempts to perform a reverse DNS lookup and fetch the preseed.cfg file via HTTP, both of which timeout and fail before the switch port the machine is attached to enters the forwarding state. a nice strategy to detect if the network is usable might be to send ARP requests for the default gateway's IP address and consider the network "up" only after the default gateway is reachable. it looks like there is a busybox version of the arping utility that could help accomplish this. -- Robert Edmonds edmonds@debian.org
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature