As with most of my posts recently I have been looking at what is required to setup an isolated lab environment and from what started out as a simple idea, has slightly snowballed, due to one or more issues along the way.
The most recent is… During the installation I found that after selecting my installation options via the GUI, I was confronted with a status message “Waiting for 1 threads to finish”. It sat there for a very long time!
The fix
Adding the “inst.geoloc=0” kernel parameter. So my CentOS 7.2 code block in the pxelinux.cfg/default now looks like this;
LABEL Install_CentOS_7_2 MENU LABEL CentOS 7.2 KERNEL centos7/vmlinuz APPEND initrd=http://rhc-server.lab.tobyheywood.com/centos7/images/pxeboot/initrd.img inst.repo=http://rhc-server.lab.tobyheywood.com/centos7 inst.geoloc=0
Why does this make a difference
Well, it turns out the RHEL/CentOS 7 installation process & Fedoras’ for that matter try to be clever and determine your geographical location. Now in a sandboxed world, that is going to be pretty challenging for the installer to accomplish, so it sits there, doing for all intents and purposes not a lot.
Adding the above mentioned parameter helps by simply disabling that functionality.
As with all things in life reading the manual is very useful. 🙂
And here is the manual; https://rhinstaller.github.io/anaconda/boot-options.html
Thanks to Matt Brown on Flickr.com for the featured image
Thanks for this trick, it was causing me some bother, but I still get this error when installing a CentOS VM using “inst.geoloc=0 inst.cmdline”
Although it happens much less frequently I’m still finding the issue
Hi Martyn,
If you’d like to share the full set of installation options you are passing to the installer I will see if I can replicate the issue in my lab.
Regards
Toby