New/Clean Install Problem?

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#1 Tue, 04/11/2006 - 14:21
ChuckFisher

New/Clean Install Problem?

I have built a new CentOS 4.3 server and am running the Virtualmin install.sh but it is taking a VERY long time. The screen has...

Downloading headers to solve dependencies...

#

after 2 hours, but it's not at a dead stand-still. Every so often a new # will show up. I am new to CentOS so I'm not %100 sure what I'm looking at, but for a benchmark, I can install the basic Debian with ftp or http over the Internet in less than 30 minutes on this same hardware and internet connection. I have reloaded this machine several times to test different scenarios and have used yum and up2date to manually install some large packages and they download normally (153K was the slowest I saw)

Anyone have a idea why this is so slow before I fall asleep?

Tue, 04/11/2006 - 18:09
Joe
Joe's picture

Hey Chuck,

You've just been unlucky in the mirror selection...It should be much faster, but sometimes you'll get a bum mirror that is very slow.

Our server is extremely fast, on a big 100Mbps pipe, and nowhere near overloaded, so it's not our repo that's the culprit, but we have to install a lot of system standard stuff during the installation, so it can take a long time if the system mirror is really slow.

You may want to interrupt the install (if it's still running when you read this) and try it again. The hope would be that the mirror selected would be a faster one this time around. You could, instead, edit the up2date sources to make it selecta mirror that you know is fast. I like mirrors.kernel.org and the Georgia Tech mirror at ftp-linux.cc.gatech.edu. CentOS also provides a list of mirrors at their website, of course.

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Tue, 04/11/2006 - 21:28
ChuckFisher

Thanks for the reply Joe!

After a little over 5 hours it finally finished, and I've got some domains up on it.

I guess what confuses me is that if I manually choose to install a package with up2date or yum then all goes well. It's not until I use the install.sh that it takes so long.

I'll play with the mirror settings for up2date and see what I can come up with.

Thanks!

Sun, 04/16/2006 - 08:37
troymilburn

http://www.centos.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=118

yum install yum-plugin-fastestmirror

The use of the Fastest Mirror yum plugin (yum-plugin-fastestmirror) with the update system is highly encouraged for normal users. This plugin will look at the dynamically provided mirror list and pick the fastest mirror based on connection time from your client machine. It will also rank the mirrors in connection speed order for fail-over connections.

The combination of a geographically based, fresh, and ranked by speed mirrorlist system should provide CentOS users with a reliable and high speed mirror system with fail-over tolerance.

i was having the same problem
this didnt help
but i think its on thread

Sun, 04/16/2006 - 15:41
ChuckFisher

I have seen this (about yum-plugin-fastestmirror) but did not try it myself because it was for yum and not up2date. So I cannot add my 2 cents. But I did try Joe's suggestion of mirrors and tried a clean install this weekend, and even though it was not as fast as I would like, it did go faster (2 hours instead of 5).
This install was also on different hardware, and is the fist time I've been able to install CentOS on it (the RAID controller was not recognized and it took me a little while to find the solution).
So, with hardware and mirror changes I don't know if either or both were responsible for the "faster" install, but now that the origional CentOS server is free to play with, and has had some benchmarks established, I'm planning to look into this more.

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