[Spacewalk-list] Spacewalk, cobbler & syslinux: bootable .iso problems

[Kalchik, Jeffery]

Good morning, all.

I've apparently managed to work myself into a corner....

I've been running Satellite (for RHEL deployments) and Spacewalk (Oracle Linux 5, Oracle Linux 6 and CentOS6 at the moment,) for a few years.  Early on in the initial Satellite deployment, I started down the road of using the underlying cobbler system for significantly more fine grained control over deployments.  At this point, I've got a fairly well working system that will more or less figure out at runtime what needs to be installed based on physical vs virtual h/w, and cobbler fields.

Over Thanksgiving, I finally upgraded my Spacewalk server to 2.2 along with all of the underlying packages, and immediately ran into a couple of issues.  One is the post-install-network-configuration snippet (fixed,) one of the Python files (also fixed,) and what I'm hoping will end up not being a major problem:  using cobbler to build a bootable .iso image for a remote network no longer works.

On alt console 3, the last 4 lines displayed are (timestamps & "INFO" removed:)

only have one network device: eth0
dnsservers is x.y.z.t1,x.y.z.t2
doing kickstart... setting it up
result of pumpSetupInterface is pumpSetupInterface failed: create route - 1: Operation not permitted.

I'm reasonably sure that the cobbler system profile is proper.  The profile works for a client server on the same network as the Spacewalk server when PXE booted, yet after building the .iso image, and booting from that, I get the above failure consistently.  This has been an issue on every cobbler profile generated since the spacewalk upgrade.  I can apparently get it to work on cobbler profiles generated prior to the upgrade and not modified since.  I cannot ping the client server, even from the same subnet.  It's not getting far enough to request anything from the Spacewalk server, I'm not seeing anything in /var/log/httpd/access_log.  I've gone so far as to build a second Spacewalk server on CentOS6 (original is running OEL5,) and am seeing the same behavior.  It's more than a little difficult to collect logs on this, as I don't have any way to pull from the booting client server.

I don't foresee not using this method going forward.  Utilizing cobbler, koan, cheetah, etc. gives me a lot of options during the initial provisioning process.  At the moment, I can survive without the .iso boot method, but down the road, I do expect some problems to crop up.

Has anyone else ran into this?  I'm at a loss for where to look next.

Jeff Kalchik
Systems Engineering
Land O'Lakes

Environment (from the test Spacewalk server:)

$ rpm -qa | egrep 'spacewalk|cobbler|syslinux' | sort
cobbler20-2.0.11-29.el6.noarch
cobbler2-2.0.11-29.el6.noarch
cobbler-loaders-1.0.2-2.el6.noarch
spacewalk-admin-2.2.5-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-backend-2.2.43-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-backend-app-2.2.43-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-backend-applet-2.2.43-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-backend-config-files-2.2.43-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-backend-config-files-common-2.2.43-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-backend-config-files-tool-2.2.43-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-backend-iss-2.2.43-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-backend-iss-export-2.2.43-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-backend-libs-2.2.43-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-backend-package-push-server-2.2.43-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-backend-server-2.2.43-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-backend-sql-2.2.43-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-backend-sql-postgresql-2.2.43-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-backend-tools-2.2.43-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-backend-xml-export-libs-2.2.43-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-backend-xmlrpc-2.2.43-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-base-2.2.33-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-base-minimal-2.2.33-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-base-minimal-config-2.2.33-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-branding-2.2.5-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-certs-tools-2.2.1-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-common-2.2.2-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-config-2.2.2-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-doc-indexes-2.2.2-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-grail-2.2.33-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-html-2.2.33-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-java-2.2.126-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-java-config-2.2.126-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-java-lib-2.2.126-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-java-postgresql-2.2.126-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-jpp-workaround-2.2.3-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-monitoring-2.2.1-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-monitoring-selinux-2.2.1-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-postgresql-2.2.2-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-pxt-2.2.33-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-remote-utils-2.2.2-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-repo-2.2-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-schema-2.2.33-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-search-2.2.8-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-selinux-2.2.1-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-setup-2.2.13-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-setup-jabberd-2.0.1-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-setup-postgresql-2.2.2-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-slf4j-1.6.1-6.el6.noarch
spacewalk-sniglets-2.2.33-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-taskomatic-2.2.126-1.el6.noarch
spacewalk-utils-2.2.25-1.el6.noarch
syslinux-4.02-8.el6.x86_64

cobbler buildiso run:

task started: 2015-01-16_115932_buildiso
task started (id=Build Iso, time=Fri Jan 16 11:59:32 2015)
using/creating buildisodir: /var/cache/cobbler/buildiso
building tree for isolinux
copying miscellaneous files
copying kernels and initrds for profiles
copying kernels and initrds for systems
generating a isolinux.cfg
generating profile list
generating system list
- ksdevice bootif set for system ahdoul012
done writing config
running: mkisofs -o /home/jkalc/generated.iso -r -b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -V Cobbler\ Install -R -J -T /var/cache/cobbler/buildiso
received on stdout:
received on stderr: I: -input-charset not specified, using utf-8 (detected in locale settings)
Size of boot image is 4 sectors -> No emulation
67.30% done, estimate finish Fri Jan 16 11:59:33 2015
Total translation table size: 4029
Total rockridge attributes bytes: 1320
Total directory bytes: 4700
Path table size(bytes): 40
Max brk space used 1a000
7444 extents written (14 MB)

ISO build complete
You may wish to delete: /var/cache/cobbler/buildiso
The output file is: /home/jkalc/generated.iso
*** TASK COMPLETE ***
This message may contain confidential material from Land O'Lakes, Inc. (or its subsidiary) for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may not be reviewed, disclosed, copied, distributed or used by anyone other than the intended recipient(s). If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and delete all copies of this message.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/spacewalk-list/attachments/20150116/34db0305/attachment.htm>