Rootstrap Failing - is it the debbootstrap problem? or a comms problem

[Alan Chandler <alan@chandlerfamily.org.uk>]

I noticed someone on here said they had had a problem with debbootstrap 
failing.  I must admit, that I had tried to build a chroot environment on my 
machine in despairation after failing to get user-mode-linux to run and found 
that it failed on me.

However, I persevered with uml and have managed to get a user-mode-linux 
system up and running with rootstrap (I know its running and the network 
works because I am pinging it).  However after running for a few hours (stuck 
on the line with I: at the front) it eventually gives up with the 
uninformative error message shown below.  The best I can deduce is that its 
failed somewhere in the debian module.


Using rootstrap module debian from:
        /usr/lib/rootstrap/modules/debian
I: Retrieving http://www.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/sid/
Release
E: Failed getting release file http://www.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.debian.org/
debian/dists/sid/Release
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/rootstrap/builder", line 66, in ?
    dispatch(module, modulevars)
  File "/usr/lib/rootstrap/builder", line 44, in dispatch
    raise "rootstrap: Module '%s' failed, status: %d" % (module,status)
rootstrap: Module 'debian' failed, status: 1
Kernel panic: Attempted to kill init!

I mounted on the loop device the resultant file that had been created as the 
supposidely new filesystem and discovered that it only has /var/lib/apt/lists 
directory has been created and this is empty.  The rest of the filesystem is 
empty.

During the long wait, an ifconfig showed a tap device created and a small, but 
rather low speed traffic crossing that boundary.  I am not 100% convinced 
that communications from within the uml is getting out without lots of 
timeouts.

Any ideas how I can get a better picture of what is happening?





-- 
Alan Chandler
alan@chandlerfamily.org.uk