Across the Internet Installations are neither recommended nor supported
We do NOT recommend doing an installation by pointing at a package archive mirror across the public internet. They are unsupported, for several reasons.
There are several reasons which form the basis for this recommendation:
- anaconda (which is the installation engine underneath such an install) does not have good package retrieval timeout recovery and retry mechanism.
- anaconda does not support proxies (this changes in later versions somewhat).
- The installation progress messages which anaconda places in virtual consoles 3, 4, and 5 are at best cryptic, and not overly meaningful to a person who has not done many installations using that tool.
- anaconda's GUI install method also is NOT well suited to 'minimal' installs, as it pulls in an overly large installation, prolonging an already fragile install process.
- It is essentially impossible to debug installation issues during such installs, as the server side logs, which detail install progress state and list packages retrieved, are unavailable.
- It is also painfully slow to do such an install compared to the speed with a local package archive.
- Mirrors are not assured to remain 'coherent', and cannot readily be made to do so by CentOS admins during an 'across the internet' install process. Indeed during times of synchronization or new content being placed on a given mirror, an install can return errors that simply cannot be reproduced or debugged 'ex post'.
- "But my favorite Debian derived ditribution works just fine for 'across the internet' installs" -- Debian based installation results are different as their installer differs from Anaconda.
People attempting such installations tend to be 'drive-by' distribution 'samplers' or 'first time newbies' who impose a load of many questions on CentOS support structures, seem to always be insistent on receiving immediate answers, but (from experience) have usually not read the Installation documentation. As such, there is little incentive to support such efforts by the regulars in the #centos IRC channel.
If one asserts that no other way to perform an install, the usual cautions about doing a absolutely minimal 'bootstrap' installation apply; That is, seek to minimize the pain in this poor installation environment by choosing the fewest needed packages to handle partitioning, and to get the host to a state where any remaining packages may be added using the more robust yum mechanism, AFTER the first reboot.
Bottom line: "across the internet" installations are not likely to end well for novice installers, and are not recommended. Don't do that. It is not supported.