Wired Network Problems Rawhide

[Al Dunsmuir]

Hello Tom,

Sunday, November 30, 2008, 4:40:55 PM, you wrote:

> On Sun, 30 Nov 2008 16:02:07 -0500
> Al Dunsmuir <al.dunsmuir at sympatico.ca> wrote:

>> My experiences are identical - static networking is extremely unwell for
>> the FC10 release right now.

> When I was installing using the hard disk install technique, I noticed
> a "asknetwork" anaconda option. I used it during the install and
> actually got a good ifcfg-eth0 setup by it, so at least anaconda
> can get it right (if you know how to ask it).

Past GUI Fedora release installs allowed one to set up appropriate static
networking out of the box.  This one just asked for my host name - I did
not see any prompt during FC10 install to allow me to specify what I really
wanted.    The i386 box is a Dell GX270 - I'd tried a FC10 preview level
but it dropped me into the text install where there were many additional
prompts for server-type.  Unfortunately, it didn't install X, so I had
to download the i386 FC10 final and do it over again.

One should not have to know secret Anaconda handshakes.  The GUI and text
installers have been largely equivalent in the past, but this seems to
be no longer the case.  Like "Allow logon as root", static networking
should be a clear user choice with either install method.  Oh.  Right.

Since seeing another post about an hour ago about the blazing speed of ext4
fsck operations on large drives, I've installed yet again on the i386
box,  splitting my main partition into 2 separate ones - a 200 GB for root,
and the remainder for an ext4 samba share.  My X64 box has 2 x 1 TB drives.
I had the unpleasant experience of sitting through a gratuitous system-wide
fsck on what happened to be my 25th reboot.   That system was initially set
up with FC9, then upgraded to FC10 a day after GA... but this networking mess
has resulted in many extra reboots. Once the i386 box is completely set up
and proves stable with ext4, the 2 large non-root partitions on the X64 box
will that box will go ext4 too.

I think the current Anaconda in both modes has lost much necessary function,
and no longer has appropriate support for non-trivial systems.  There needs
to be a serious rethink for FC11 (and hopefully FC10 service/respins) unless
Fedora actually _intends_ to alienate everyone running more complex (server
and otherwise) setups on their home LAN.

Al