#1143963 installation-reports: freezes after Go Back at mirror selection (ftp.uni-hannover.de)

#1143963#5
Date:
2026-08-08 22:21:00 UTC
From:
To:
(Please provide enough information to help the Debian
maintainers evaluate the report efficiently - e.g., by filling
in the sections below.)

Boot method: USB
Image version: https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-cd/debian-13.6.0-amd64-netinst.iso
Date: 2026-08-08 15:25 (GMT-3)

Machine: Custom-built desktop (no OEM; DMI sys_vendor/product_name are placeholder strings)
  Motherboard: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. H170 PRO GAMING
  BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. 3805, 2018-05-16
  CPU: Intel Core i5-6600K @ 3.50GHz (4 cores), amd64
  RAM: 32 GB
  Ethernet: Intel I219-V (e1000e)

Partitions:

$ df -Tl
Filesystem     Type    1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1      ext4    105148184  17315976  82444792  18% /
/dev/sda1      vfat        98304     36796     61508  38% /boot/efi
/dev/sda3      ntfs3   233774368 169373548  64400820  73% (Windows, pre-existing)
/dev/nvme0n1p1 ext4    232043640 175910864  44272760  80% (data disk, pre-existing)

$ lsblk
sda         223.6G  SSD
|-sda1        100M  vfat   /boot/efi     EFI system partition (created by Windows, reused)
|-sda2         16M                       Microsoft reserved partition
|-sda3      222.9G  ntfs                 Basic data partition (Windows)
`-sda4        522M  ntfs                 (Windows recovery)
sdb         111.8G  SSD  <- target disk for this installation
|-sdb1      102.4G  ext4   /
`-sdb2        9.3G  swap   [SWAP]
nvme0n1     232.9G  NVMe <- pre-existing data disk, left untouched
|-nvme0n1p1 225.9G  ext4
`-nvme0n1p2     7G  swap


Base System Installation Checklist:
[O] = OK, [E] = Error (please elaborate below), [ ] = didn't try it

Initial boot:           [O]
Detect network card:    [O]
Configure network:      [O]
Detect media:           [O]
Load installer modules: [O]
Clock/timezone setup:   [O]
User/password setup:    [O]
Detect hard drives:     [O]
Partition hard drives:  [O]
Install base system:    [O]
Install tasks:          [ ]
Install boot loader:    [O]
Overall install:        [O]

Comments/Problems:

I hit exactly one problem, early in the process, at the mirror selection
step.

I accidentally selected ftp.uni-hannover.de, which was not the mirror I
wanted, and used "Go Back" to return to the previous screen and correct
my choice. At that point the installer became completely unresponsive:
it stopped reacting to any input and showed no progress at all. I waited
roughly 6 minutes to give it a chance to recover or to time out on its
own, but nothing happened, and I had to reset the
machine. This was on 2026-08-08 at about 15:03 -0300 (18:03 UTC).

My recollection is that it froze on the "Downloading Release file" step,
but I am not completely certain of the exact screen and I would rather
not state it as fact. What I am certain of is that the freeze happened
immediately after I selected that mirror and used "Go Back".

After the reboot I started the installation again from scratch, picked
the mirror I actually wanted on the first try, and everything went
perfectly from that point on: no errors, no warnings, nothing that
required manual intervention. The resulting system works correctly.

One possibly relevant observation, made from the installed system after
the fact: ftp.uni-hannover.de resolves correctly to 130.75.2.22, but TCP
connections to both port 80 and port 443 time out with no response and
no rejection - the packets appear to be silently dropped rather than
refused. By way of comparison, deb.debian.org answers the equivalent
request in about 0.3 seconds. I should be clear that this is a single
observation from my own network and I cannot tell whether the mirror was
unreachable globally, either at install time or now.

If that is what the installer ran into, then from the outside it looked
as though it was blocked on a network operation that never timed out,
and "Go Back" was unable to interrupt it. That is my interpretation of
what I saw, not something I was able to verify.

Unfortunately I have no logs for the failed attempt. Because I had to
reset the machine, /var/log/installer on the installed system only
contains the successful second run.

A few details about this installation that may be worth noting, all of
which worked without any problem on the second attempt:

- Dual boot alongside a pre-existing Windows installation, on a machine
  with three disks. The EFI System Partition (/dev/sda1) had already
  been created and was in use by Windows; the installer correctly
  reused it and installed Debian onto a different physical disk
  (/dev/sdb), leaving the Windows partitions on /dev/sda untouched. A
  third disk (NVMe, /dev/nvme0n1) holding pre-existing data was also
  left alone. Detection and partitioning across the three disks was
  handled correctly, and GRUB boots both systems.

- Non-free firmware was pulled in automatically by the installer, as
  expected since Debian 12. /var/log/installer/firmware-summary reports:

      firmware-nvidia-graphics   non-free-firmware   modalias
      intel-microcode            non-free-firmware   cpu

- Networking worked out of the box throughout the installation (Intel
  I219-V, e1000e driver, DHCP), which is also why the netinst image was
  able to fetch everything it needed.

Overall, apart from the freeze described above, this was an excellent
installation experience. Thanks for all the work on the installer.


Please make sure that any installation logs that you think would
be useful are attached to this report. (You can find them in the
installer system in /var/log/ and later on the installed system
under /var/log/installer.) Please compress large files using gzip.

#1143963#10
Date:
2026-08-10 17:31:14 UTC
From:
To:
You did not wait long enough. It appears that GNU wget gives up after
~47 minutes by default. This is because the default retry count is 20,
and the default connection time-out is ~2'10" (set by the system).

IMO, setting a much lower retry count in choose-mirror would be saner.

FWIW, you could have switched to a shell in tty2 or tty3, run 'ps' to
print the wget PID and 'kill' to terminate it. Then switch back to the
installer screen (tty1 in text mode, tty5 in graphic mode) and select
another mirror.

#1143963#15
Date:
2026-08-10 17:31:14 UTC
From:
To:
You did not wait long enough. It appears that GNU wget gives up after
~47 minutes by default. This is because the default retry count is 20,
and the default connection time-out is ~2'10" (set by the system).

IMO, setting a much lower retry count in choose-mirror would be saner.

FWIW, you could have switched to a shell in tty2 or tty3, run 'ps' to
print the wget PID and 'kill' to terminate it. Then switch back to the
installer screen (tty1 in text mode, tty5 in graphic mode) and select
another mirror.