[14:53] <fish_> I'm trying to pxe boot the precise installer but it says: IP-Config: no response after X seconds - giving up (but still retries somehow ;))
[14:53] <fish_> anyways, I see the request and offer in the dhcp server log (dnsmasq)
[14:54] <fish_> not sure why it's not accepting the offer. any ideas what could restrict it?
[14:55] <fish_> and obviously dhcp seems to work, since it has booted pxe booted the installer seconds ago just fine
[15:27] <devicenull> fish_: is it a cisco switch? do you have portfast enabled?
[15:30] <fish_> devicenull: yes it's a cisco switch but I never heard of portfast. but it's a managed infrastructure (rackspace), so it might be enabled. I'll ask the support
[15:30] <devicenull> if portfast is disabled, you'll generally see intermittent timeouts for dhcp
[15:30] <devicenull> it's disabled by default, dunno if rackspace turns it on
[15:31] <fish_> devicenull: but it wasn't a intermittend timeout, it keeps retrying several times (dhcp server sends an offer each time) but it never send a request/binds the ip
[15:32] <fish_> but I realized that there are two dhcp servers. eth0 = my dhcp server, eth1 = rackspace dhcp server
[15:32] <fish_> sure, I need them to disable their dhcp server. but the behaviour is still confusing
[15:34] <devicenull> isn't there an option to specify which interface to use?  I don't know a ton about the ubuntu installer, but centos has 'bootif=eth0' as a kernel parameter
[15:35] <fish_> devicenull: unfortunately the order of interface isn't stable, so you can't really know which interface eth0 is
[15:35] <devicenull> ah
[15:35] <fish_> you can specific the mac, but I don't know the mac before booting
[15:36] <fish_> but I just booted the installer with 'break' to get a shell and it seems ipconfig works fine when executing manually