Beta distro install fails

Install gets as far as “Package Installation” and fails with “Retrying Package Download”.

The retries eventually run out trying to retrieve stunnel-4.15.2.el5.1.i386.rpm from … somewhere. To save lookups, this is the very first attempted file download.

Net connectivity looks great. I tried static and DHCP with identical results.

We’ve got 50Mbps fiber here, so networking shouldn’t be any problem at all. Flipping to VT2 and pinging a well-known internet site (ftp.x.org by name - tests DNS and routing) works fine.

This appears to be a CentOS Net-Distro related issue.

Given that the distro version will likely be burned to a CD anyway, is there a specific reason why the team decided to throw extra potential points of failure into the works by making the OS a net install?

Small downloads are great if they work. I have a zero-byte download that does the same thing as this one, except really REALLY fast. ;o)

Seriously though, any perceived reliability gained from using CentOS (highly debatable all by itself) is lost by using an installation method that is guaranteed to fail periodically, and according to Murphy, is most likely to fail at the exact time when you really need it not to.