[Spacewalk-list] Spacewalk setup questions

[Craig Pendleton]

I am a new user of Spacewalk, currently working through initial setup for
RHEL and CentOS base and ³client tools² child channels.  I¹ve run into a
host of problems, and I¹m hoping some kind soul can help me sort these out.
Please excuse the long post.

I¹ve read through most of the Spacewalk Wiki and Redhat Satellite/RHN
documentation, and I can¹t seem to track these issues down.   What I¹m
looking to accomplish is:

1. Kickstart RHEL and CentOS clients that install all required Spacewalk
client components and self-register to OS and config file channels with my
Spacewalk server 
2. Automatically deploy errata, updates, and config files to these systems
based on their channel membership, through Spacewalk.  Remote commands as
well. 
3. Security is not very important in my environment, as these are throw-away
test systems on an isolated segment

I have done the following:

1. Build spacewalk server, according to the following instructions:
https://fedorahosted.org/spacewalk/wiki/HowToInstall
2. I¹ve followed these instructions for channel/kickstart setup for both
RHEL and CentOS: 
https://fedorahosted.org/spacewalk/wiki/HowToKickstartCobbler
3. Run ³cobbler buildiso² for a bootstrap install disk, as I can¹t use
cobbler¹s integrated DHCP/PXE in my environment

What is working:

1. Clients kickstart  fine, using the buildiso created with cobbler.
2. Clients apparently self-register to the correct base and child OS
channels, via a rhnreg_ks command in my ks.cfg
3. Clients show entitlements management, virtualization, provisioning,
monitoring following kickstart

What I can¹t get working properly:

    1. Install all required client tools during kickstart.  All the client
RPMs are in the ³client tools² child channel that the client is kickstarting
from, but none of these packages get installed.   Installing these from
Spacewalk also fails.
    2. Since client tools weren¹t being installed during kickstart, I¹ve
even tried a bunch of ³wget http://mirror.whatever.com/package.rpm && yum
localinstall package.rpm² installs in my ks.cfg.   For some reason kickstart
always hangs on jabberpy and koan installs.
    3. Push any packages or config files to clients.   I can schedule them
in Spacewalk, but they sit in a pending state until they fail.  Remote
commands do the same.
    4. ³OSA Status² is showing offline on the system page in Spacewalk
    5. Since I cannot use DHCP/PXE for this in my environment, I would like
to pass a hostname parameter to kickstart when booting from the cobbler
buildiso.  Is that possible?

Thank you in advance for any assistance.   I¹ll be happy to provide any
information you might need to help me, but I¹m not sure where to start
looking at this point.

Regards,
Craig


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