Troubleshooting

This section documents error messages and situations you might run into when installing the system, and whatever solutions we have come up for those problems. If you know of other problems and/or solutions, please let us know so we can add to this list.

Problems when starting the install

These are problems that crop up from the time you boot the client until the client reboots for the first time.

Neighbor table overflow

If you boot a client machine and get this message, it usually means that the client cannot NFS-mount the FAI directories from the server. This could be caused by a number of things:

• The client's network card may not have been recognised. To check this, type
  $\langle\textnormal{shift}\rangle$+ $\langle\textnormal{page up}\rangle$ to scroll through the boot messages. Make sure that the kernel has recognised the eth0 network interface. (what does the message look like? -P.)

  If it seems that the network card has not been recognised, try switching network cards.

• The client may not be seeing the network. Often this is as simple as forgetting to plug a network cable into the client's network card. (I have done this many times..)

Kernel panic: could not mount root fs

This also means that the client could not NFS-mount directories from the server. The same fixes as the “neighbor table overflow” message apply here.

Problems during configuration

This covers problems you might run into when trying to configure the X-server and set up the system. You might also look at Section 5 for more troubleshooting information.

None of the software on the system is right!

If you notice that a significant amount of software is missing, or a lot of weird packages were installed, make sure that you did not use the boot floppy labelled “Custom boot floppy! Experts only!” If you did this, then you inadvertently used the boot disk the project administrators use to develop the installer. You should have known better; now you will have to re-install the system using one of the regular boot floppies.

Sorry, the following packages failed to install:

At one point, some Debian packages were broken - the packages themselves work, but FAI did not install them properly. The problem turned out to be that swap space was not enabled, so the installer was running out of memory.

If you see any messages like:

Sorry, the following packages failed to install:

then the configuration was unsuccessful. This indicates some bug with the installer; you should report a problem and write down the configuration for the installed system - especially the packages you installed, the amount of memory the system had, and the hard drive size. You might see this package during the first installation phase (when packages are being downloaded or configured) or when you are trying to configure the system.

Running dpkg -configure -pending might fix matters.

Since we now activate swap space, one possible cause of this problem is that some of the package dependencies are actually broken. Sometimes this is because packages are missing from the local mirror, and sometimes this is because upgraded packages have errors. In these cases please contact the project administrator: this is an important problem that will affect all installations.