[arch-general] Problem with Transient resolver failure with pacman (Don't Panic)

[Nigel Henry]

On Thursday 19 June 2008 08:10, 甘露(Lu Gan) wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 11:46 AM, Abhishek Dasgupta <abhidg at gmail.com> 
wrote:
> > On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 11:53 PM, Nigel Henry
> >
> > <cave.dnb2m97pp at aliceadsl.fr> wrote:
> >> I have Archlinux running on one machine with no problems, but the
> >> install was done a while back. I've just installed it on a new machine
> >> that I've built, but am having problems running pacman -Sy.
> >>
> >> The network setup is ok. I use static IP addresses, and everything is
> >> correctly set. /etc/resolv.conf has the correct nameserver set, and the
> >> gateway 192.168.0.1 in /etc/rc.conf is active by removing the "!".
> >>
> >> Running pacman -Sy though is constantly giving me a "Transient resolver
> >> failure" . Pacman -Sy is trying every mirror on the planet, and must
> >> have worked it's way through at least 30 up to now.
> >>
> >> There must be some setting that I havn't got right.
> >>
> >> Any suggestions would be most definately gratefully received.
> >
> > Have you tried manually downloading a package from the
> > ftp mirrors and see if it is working or not?

I did try wget, and got a failure to resolve address, which is when it got me 
thinking about the 2 NIC's that were enabled. See below.
> >
> > --
> > Abhishek
>
> Do you use (netcfg2's) net-profile?

Thanks to both of you for your replies. I've discovered what the problem was, 
its fixed.

The first distro I put on my new machine was Fedora 8, and the 2.6.22 kernel 
didn't want to know the onboard NIC on this Asus M2N-X Plus mobo. I disabled 
the onboard card in the BIOS, and installed a Realtek 8139 PCI card, which as 
usual, worked fine. Then I did all the updates for Fedora 8, which included a 
2.6.25 kernel. Rebooted with the 2.6.25 kernel, which was ok. Rebooted again, 
and enabled the onboard NIC to see if it would now work, which it did, and 
set it as eth1. There was no cable connected to it, but I presumed it would 
be ok, and left it enabled.

Then I installed Archlinux (Don't Panic), and is when I had the problem 
accessing the Internet with pacman -Sy. It seems like pacman -Sy was trying 
to use eth0, and udev as it often does played hit and miss with card 
ordering, and had set the onboard card (which was still enabled) as eth0, and 
as there was no cable connected to the card, resulted in the "Transient 
resolver failure". I eventually realised what the problem might be, and 
disabled the onboard NIC again, and now pacman -Sy works again.

Thanks again for the quick replies.

Nigel.