I was installing Fedora Core 1 in a lab with about 10 computers. The first machine we did a simple CD install, then created an NFS share (/var/ftp/pub/fedora-core-1) and copied all the CD data to it. We then made a kickstart boot disk and proceeded to do NFS installs on all the other stations, pretty straight forward stuff. About ten minutes into it, the NFS installs froze. We waited a while and noticed some *very* slow activity on some of the machines (like one package in 15 minutes). Figuring it could be a simple disk access issue on the server, we killed all but two of the installs and waited... no improvement was seen. We then attempted to restart the NFS server with (service nfs restart). It stopped everything okay, but then hung when attempting to restart nfs. Out of frustration we then rebooted that machine and when it came up the remaining installs started to fly through packages like they had initially... for about ten minutes. Same deal again, installs hung and we couldn't restart NFS. A reboot cleared it. I checked out /var/log/messages but didn't see anything. This time it finished, but in the meantime we installed the rest of the lab with the CD. Sorry I don't have more detailed info, we were in a rush to get the lab back up for a class.
I'll try to repeat this tonight. My hunch is its an NFS issue and I just happened to run accross it with these installs.
Also I should mention a few months ago we installed RH9 in this lab using NFS and kickstart just like this and had no issues.
Has anyone else noticed issues like this? Anyone done a bunch of concurent NFS installs and *NOT* noticed this issue?
----- begin /etc/exports ----- /var/ftp/pub *(ro) ----- end /etc/exports -----
- Johnathan
