Precise alternate (and therefore LTSP) install fails

[Mark Ellse]

On socket 775 and 1155 motherboards, Precise i386 intermittently fails to install from alternate CD.

Machine is not locked up, but merely stalled and some information is available by pressing Ctrl Alt F4.

Gigabyte G31-M, and Foxconn, both 775 motherboards, install stops after inputting hostname. Ctrl Alt F4 information shows no errors. The last things to be on the screen are several successes with these at the end:

DEBUG: Writing DHCP stanza for eth0
DEBUG: Success!

(Bug report rewritten after further testing with Precise final and Quantal Daily 12/8/12)

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

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[Mark Ellse (markellse)]

This affects Precise Beta 1 (as well as alpha 2).
This bug is intermittent, with no obvious reason for the occurrences. (Fault manifest on two different machines with different motherboards and chipsets.)

[Mark Ellse (markellse)]

This bug prevents the favoured simple install of LTSP from the Alternate CD or DVD.

[Mark Ellse (markellse)]

This bug is still there on Precise final and 1155 motherboards.

[Mark Ellse (markellse)]

Further testing shows that it is intermittent, and testing with the Quantal alternate daily build (21/07/12) shows that the bug is still there.

[Mark Ellse (markellse)]

The system appears to be stalling after writing the network configuration. So have tried it with a range of different network cards (with different chips) to see if it is a chip specific issue. Behaviour evident with all tested network cards.

[Dave Gilbert (ubuntu-treblig)]

Mark, can you explain a bit more about what you mean by 'stalling'?

Some things to try :

  1) Does the caps lock light go on/off when you press the key?
  2) Can you get a console from ctrl-alt-f1 or f2 ?
    If you can:
     a) what is shown at the end of dmesg?

Dave

[Mark Ellse (markellse)]

By 'stalling', I mean that the machine fails to bring up the next configuration dialog. Caps lock light still goes on/off. I can get to a console and dmesg gives the following:

[83.922846] r8169 0000:01:00.0: eth0: link up
[83.922962] ADDRCONF (NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0: link becomes ready
[94.285754] eth0: no IPv6 routers present

Mark

[Mark Ellse (markellse)]

By the way, Many thanks for attending to this issue.

[Dave Gilbert (ubuntu-treblig)]

OK, so it sounds like most of the machine is working, just something in the installer is broke - so the quesiton is what,
could you try and get more of the logs onto this bug report.

Could you try and attach:
   * The full output of dmesg
   * Any other logs from /var/log that look interesting, there might be a specific installer.log and that would be good.

[Mark Ellse (markellse)]

I'm not very technical, so please could you instruct me how to save the output of dmesg and the other logs. What commands should I use (I am moderately skilled in using console).

Thanks again for your help.

Mark

[Dave Gilbert (ubuntu-treblig)]

If you did dmesg > dmesg.myoutput
that'll save it in a file that you can somehow copy off; similarly the other log files will be in /var/log

Probably the easiest thing to do is to plug a USB thumb drive in when it hangs,
if you're lucky the drive will automount itself in something like /media/something (do ls /media before and after plugging the thumb
drive in); if not you might have to do it manually by

mkdir /tmp/adir
mount /dev/sd?? /tmp/adir
(where /dev/sd?? is /dev/sdb1 or /dev/sdc1 depending which is next free).

and then you can use

cp dmesg.myoutput /tmp/adir (or /media/whatever if it put it there)
and when you're done do

umount /tmp/adir

before pulling the thumb drive out.

[Mark Ellse (markellse)]

I've added the output of dmesg and the logs from /var/log (there were only two).

Thanks,

Mark

[Dave Gilbert (ubuntu-treblig)]

High: Failure to install

Hi Mark,
  I can't see anything really wrong in those logs; there are a few complaints about packages/files apparently missing - but I'm not sure if that's normal or not (something someone more familiar with the normal debug of debian-installer might no better).
The logs certainly don't seem to show any disk or CDROM errors or anything like that.

[Mark Ellse (markellse)]

Bug still present in 12.04.2, but more intermittent, increasing chances of continuing to successful install. Not yet tested to full LTSP install.

[dominique desforges (dominiquedesforges69)]

thks for your conselleling it did help

[Tero Lyytikäinen (terska)]

This bug affects me with 12.04.02 installer. I'm booting from usb on a HP dc5300 with 3 network cards. The same usb image has been used to successfully install other systems. The hanging is not intermittent as I have tried to install several times. Also the hanging is permanent or at least didn't continue the install in 24 hours. The network autodetection goes fine and then it hangs. Alt-F4 shows:

DEBUG: Writing DHCP stanza for eth0
DEBUG: Success!

as the last lines logged.

By logging in to console (Alt-F2) and running ps I saw as the last processes in the list:

16014 root 8712 S rdnssd -f -u root -r /tmp/rndssd_resolv
16015 root 10812 S rdnssd -f -u root -r /tmp/rndssd_resolv

running kill 16015 "solved" the hang and the installation proceeded further.

Hope this information helps someone.