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

[Jonathan DeHaan]

My experience is with Fedora, rather than CentOS, but I suspect you are 
running into the same problem.

Anaconda does not pull repomd.xml from the base repository, it pulls it 
from the installation media. I suspect that this may be because it needs 
the location of the comps file, which Spacewalk does not provide. The 
upshot is that you need to have a repodata/repomd.xml and 
repodata/comps.xml file in your distribution tree, and the contents of 
the repomd.xml file need to match what packages you have in your base 
channel. If you have packages in your base channel that repomd.xml does 
not know about, anaconda will not find them. If you are missing packages 
from your base channel that are referenced by repomd.xml or comps.xml, 
it will complain about missing packages.

I'm not sure how the netboot ISO gets around this, but since you are 
handing it a custom kickstart, whatever workaround they have in place is 
being ignored.

Jonathan

On 12/21/2011 05:49 AM, Daniel Jabbour wrote:
> Yes, I did. I selected them all (the children: updates, and tools for 
> spacewalk).
>
> --
> Daniel Jabbour
> Senior Agnostic Algorithmatist
> Inigral, Inc. | The Social Web For Education
> drj at inigral.com <mailto:drj at inigral.com>
>
> On Dec 21, 2011, at 6:41 AM, Rick van der Linde wrote:
>
>>
>>     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
>>     gethttp://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?
>>
>> Did you select any other channels in your kickstart profile than the 
>> base CentOS channel?
>>
>> Rick
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>
>
>
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-- 
Jonathan DeHaan
Linux Systems Engineer

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