It definitely has something to do with the bond interfaces.  If I add a system with 4 interfaces, sync takes about 6 seconds.  If I add two bond interfaces, the sync time goes to around 20 seconds.  If I add a second system with two bond interfaces, it times out (3 minutes).  If I remove those bond interfaces, it syncs in around 6 seconds again.  Note that I am not touching the slave interfaces, they are still pointing to bond masters that no longer exist.

If I add 7 systems with a total of 34 interfaces plus 14 bond interfaces, the sync times out.  If I remove all the bond interfaces and try again, the sync takes about 24 seconds.

I went into dhcp.template and removed all the cheetah stuff. It made no difference at all, with one system or 7, bond interfaces or no.  So the long delays occur before cobbler starts working with the dhcp template.

Does anyone know what cobbler is doing at this point?  What is different in how it treats bond interfaces?

FYI I'm on RHEL 4.6 x86_64.  I brought in a newer syslinux (version 3.72-2.el4.rf, the latest I could find).  I went searching for a newer syslinux because the cobbler docs recommend doing that.  As I test I went back to the syslinux version that came with RHEL 4.6 (version 2.11-1) and it made no difference in the timing.

For a while I had another version of syslinux but it caused a core dump when cobbler tried to run gethostip.  So I'm wondering if syslinux is causing these long delays.  What does cobbler sync use it for?

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... Chris Weaver