[Spacewalk-list] CentOS 6 provisioning problem: can't retrieve repomd.xml

[Daniel Jabbour]

Hey all-

I am trying to load systems using Spacewalk 1.5 & Cobbler. I have configured Spacewalk (and Cobbler, DHCP, TFTP, etc) with my software channels, and created a Kickstart profile & distribution. The kickstart process starts off great, loads the PXE image, runs anaconda, and then fails when it can't find repomd.xml in the Base repo. The exact error is:

"Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for repository: anaconda-CentOS-201112060039.x86_64. Please verify its path and try again"

On the console, it seems to be attempting to fetch:

Failed to get http://10.20.3.98/ks/dist/CentOS-6-x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml "The requested URL returned error: 404"

I verified that there isn't a network/firewall issue. In fact, it seems that repomd.xml doesn't exist in the ISO image I have mounted.

Let me describe my setup so perhaps someone can tell me what I'm doing wrong:
 * I have defined a CentOS 6 Base channel, with an updates and tools channels as children.
 * I downloaded the NetBoot ISO and mounted it to /var/distro-trees/CentOS-6-x86_64.
 * I configured a distribution to point to this ISO mounted directory (/var/distro-trees/CentOS-6-x86_64).

I think the error stems from the fact that the ISO doesn't contain a repomd.xml file in /var/distro-trees/CentOS-6-x86_64. As a result, the client is 404ing.

I can't find much in the way of documentation about exactly which ISO is appropriate to use with Spacewalk, and how exactly the provisioning process works.

Any ideas?

--
Daniel Jabbour
Senior Agnostic Algorithmatist
Inigral, Inc. | The Social Web For Education
drj at inigral.com