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Date: Tue, 4 Oct 2005 17:08:49 -0700
From: David Kirchner <dpk@dpk.net>
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Subject: sysinstall MEDIA_TIMEOUT pretty high
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MEDIA_TIMEOUT is used to determine how long it will wait between
retrying a DNS lookup.

Would there be any objection to modifying the defaults sysinstall to
lower its default MEDIA_TIMEOUT from 300 seconds to something more
like 10, and then increasing the retry count from 2 to 30? The net
result should be that it would wait just as long (5 minutes) before
accepting a total failure, but it should retry often enough that two
transient failures (for whatever reason they may occur) won't cause
the installation to fail entirely, and it could help make sysinstall
just slightly more user-friendly.

(This is particularly an issue because if it cannot look up the
hostname, sysinstall will allow you to try to restart the process, but
it will then try to install the OS on the ramdisk, or do other broken
things: bin/42162 from 2002)