CentOS 5.5 remote kickstart installation stalls at "Starting install process." How to debug?

Solution 1:

Maybe it's caching RPMs on the remote server. Watch (tail -f /var/log/httpd/access_log) the access_log on the http server to check for activity.

Solution 2:

Running this installation via NFS solved the performance issue. Unfortunately, the urlgrabber portion of Yum in the post-install scripts was slow like the initial http installation attempts. The narrows the focus to the implementation of Yum's urlgrabber and something with the line distance and low-latency connection. Once the system was booted into the newly-installed OS, yum speeds were fine.

Solution 3:

I have seen this problem caused by a DNS issue.

Determine the hostname of the URL being used by anaconda, and add it to /etc/hosts:

# echo 192.168.1.1 my.server.example.com >> /etc/hosts

anaconda immediately speeds up.