[Spacewalk-list] Necessity of Mail Server Running on Spacewalk Server?

[Jan Pazdziora]

On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 07:54:13PM +0000, Wojtak, Greg (Superfly) wrote:
> 
> 
> On 2012-01-19 9:56 AM, "Jan Pazdziora" <jpazdziora at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> >On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 02:39:28PM +0000, Wojtak, Greg (Superfly) wrote:
> >> I ran into an issue yesterday that had me stumped for quite a while.  I
> >>provisioned a new host and was trying to run rhn-profile-sync
> >>afterwards.  The software profile update went through fine but the
> >>hardware profile sync kept failing with a 500 error.  I looked in the
> >>httpd logs on the spacewalk server and spent about a half hour
> >>deciphering the traceback only to realize the traceback was being
> >>generated when doing a mail call.  It turns out that postfix on my
> >>spacewalk server had stopped (I think I did that intentionally and then
> >>forgot to start it up).
> >> 
> >> I guess I just wanted to find out, should a hardware sync really rely
> >>on mail being available?  It's probably trivial, but if a traceback/500
> >>response is not intended I could see that as something that could really
> >>trip someone up.
> >> 
> >
> >We could only know if you showed us the traceback.
> >
> >-- 
> >Jan Pazdziora
> >Principal Software Engineer, Satellite Engineering, Red Hat
> >
> >_______________________________________________
> >Spacewalk-list mailing list
> >Spacewalk-list at redhat.com
> >https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/spacewalk-list
> 
> 
> I can do that.  On the client I get:
> 
> # rhn-profile-sync
> Updating package profile...
> Updating hardware profile...
> XMLRPC ProtocolError: <ProtocolError for spacewalk /XMLRPC: 500 Internal
> Server Error>
> 
> 
> On the spacewalk server, with the postfix service stopped, I get:
> [Thu Jan 19 14:52:04 2012] [error] Exception Handler Information
> [Thu Jan 19 14:52:04 2012] [error] Traceback (most recent call last):
> [Thu Jan 19 14:52:04 2012] [error]   File
> "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/spacewalk/server/apacheRequest.py", line
> 123, in call_function
> [Thu Jan 19 14:52:04 2012] [error]     response = apply(func, params)
> [Thu Jan 19 14:52:04 2012] [error]   File
> "/usr/share/rhn/server/handlers/xmlrpc/registration.py", line 991, in
> refresh_hw_profile
> [Thu Jan 19 14:52:04 2012] [error]     server.add_hardware(hardware)
> [Thu Jan 19 14:52:04 2012] [error]   File
> "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/spacewalk/server/rhnServer/server_hardwar
> e.py", line 663, in add_hardware
> [Thu Jan 19 14:52:04 2012] [error]     new_dev = class_type(hardware)
> [Thu Jan 19 14:52:04 2012] [error]   File
> "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/spacewalk/server/rhnServer/server_hardwar
> e.py", line 377, in __init__
> [Thu Jan 19 14:52:04 2012] [error]     Device.__init__(self,
> "rhnServerNetwork", fields, dict, mapping)
> [Thu Jan 19 14:52:04 2012] [error]   File
> "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/spacewalk/server/rhnServer/server_hardwar
> e.py", line 293, in __init__
> [Thu Jan 19 14:52:04 2012] [error]     Traceback(mail=1)
> [Thu Jan 19 14:52:04 2012] [error]   File
> "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/spacewalk/common/rhnTB.py", line 183, in
> Traceback
> [Thu Jan 19 14:52:04 2012] [error]     ret = rhnMail.send(headers,
> outstring)
> [Thu Jan 19 14:52:04 2012] [error]   File
> "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/spacewalk/common/rhnMail.py", line 56,
> in send
> [Thu Jan 19 14:52:04 2012] [error]     server = smtplib.SMTP('localhost')
> [Thu Jan 19 14:52:04 2012] [error]   File
> "/usr/lib64/python2.6/smtplib.py", line 239, in __init__
> [Thu Jan 19 14:52:04 2012] [error]     (code, msg) = self.connect(host,
> port)
> [Thu Jan 19 14:52:04 2012] [error]   File
> "/usr/lib64/python2.6/smtplib.py", line 295, in connect
> [Thu Jan 19 14:52:04 2012] [error]     self.sock = self._get_socket(host,
> port, self.timeout)
> [Thu Jan 19 14:52:04 2012] [error]   File
> "/usr/lib64/python2.6/smtplib.py", line 273, in _get_socket
> [Thu Jan 19 14:52:04 2012] [error]     return
> socket.create_connection((port, host), timeout)
> [Thu Jan 19 14:52:04 2012] [error]   File
> "/usr/lib64/python2.6/socket.py", line 567, in create_connection
> [Thu Jan 19 14:52:04 2012] [error]     raise error, msg
> [Thu Jan 19 14:52:04 2012] [error] error: [Errno 97] Address family not
> supported by protocol
> 
> 
> 
> The last message is due to ipv6 being disabled on the spacewalk server.

If the IPv6 is disabled, you should also remove the ::1 entry from
/etc/hosts.

And no, hardware sync does not rely on mail being available. In your
case however, something failed during that hardware sync and Spacewalk
tried to send you the traceback. And due to the IPv6 misconfig, you
did not get that email with the original error.

-- 
Jan Pazdziora
Principal Software Engineer, Satellite Engineering, Red Hat