RHEL5.5 kickstart procedure unable to download RPMs

[Michael Mayer]

Hi all,

i have a weird issue with RHEL5.5 and kickstart.

My current setup is:

All RHEL5.5 RPMs(i.e. the whole tree) and two additional repositories 
are in a subversion repo. The repo is accessible via http to the client 
to be installed.
The client is a virtual machine hosted on an ESX server. I have modified 
boot.iso as well to contain the kickstart file which points to the 
subversion repo via the "url" and "repo" commands. The boot.iso (about 
10 MB in size) is attached to the virtual machine as a virtual CD-ROM.

If the virtual server boots up, it reads the kickstart file and then 
proceeds to download the second-stage installer from the repository. It 
sets up networking, formats the disk as wanted, browses through the RPM 
repos for dependency resolution. Once that is finished, the screen 
appears where RPMs are going to be installed.

So far so good.

Now things are going odd: anaconda complains about packages being 
corrupt, broken or missing. This cannot be true here because I have 
checked md5sum of the rpm both in the repo and after downloaded via 
wget. In the SVN server access logs the respective RPM is downloaded 10 
times, each time with return code 200 which for me indicates successful 
download. If I am looking on the kickstarting server, there are no RPMs 
to be seen anywhere. If I run a wget on that kickstarted server with the 
same URL the RPM is downloaded correctly. Depending on which repos I am 
using in the kickstart file, a different RPM is thought to be corrupt.

The subversion server has got RHEL 5.3 installed.

If it was a networking issue, the second stage image and the repodata 
could not have been downloaded/read.

Anyone having suggestions as to why this is happening ? I have been 
looking in the RHEL5 manuals dealing with troubleshooting of anaconda 
and kickstart but I have not found anything there which could help.

Any suggestion highly appreciated.

Many thanks,

Michael.