ftp installation

[Robert Simmons]

On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 6:52 PM, Daniel Feenberg <feenberg at nber.org> wrote:
>
> I have tried many of the ftp sites enumerated in sysinstall, with both
> 7.4-RELEASE and 8.2-RELEASE, and in all cases the installation proceeds
> for a few seconds and then hangs, with the last message on the console
> always being:
>
>  DEBUG: Generating /etc/fstab file.
>
> This happens with several different systems. I believe it is not any
> hardware problem, since I was able to install 7.4 from NFS. (I have
> unrelated problems with 8.2).
>
> If I ftp to any of the mentioned FreeBSD ftp servers under manual control, I
> have no trouble downloading ISO files. The ftp sites tried include
> ftp[34567].freebsd.org and ftp10.us.freebsd.org. We have no firewall or
> proxy regulating outbound connections.
>
> Is there something off about the sysinstall ftp dialog? I don't see a way to
> monitor what is happening.

Your firewall may be interfering with the connection.  You may want to
read the handbook section on FTP installs (the grey box at the bottom
of the page):
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install-media.html

You can determine if you are having a firewall problem specific to FTP
by using an HTTP proxy install (if it works, you need to change your
firewall rules).  A convenient list of free and open http proxies is
available here:
http://www.xroxy.com/proxylist.htm

Just narrow the list down to http proxies that are near you (US, I
assume) then arrange them in order of ascending latency (there is a
drop down menu for this).  The top few should work great for you.

I have found that going a step further will ensure using the fastest
proxy.  Just install netselect from the ports collection:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/url.cgi?ports/net/netselect/pkg-descr
http://apenwarr.ca/netselect/
then feed the top 10 proxies from xroxy to netselect and use the one
it selects as fastest.  All of this can be scripted using wget to
scrape the data from xroxy when you need it, since free and open
proxies disappear faster than fart in a fan factory.