The 5.3 upgrade broke the kickstart procedures for my xen virtual machines. They are installed via http.

1. The installer sets up the timezone interactively even though it is specified in the kickstart file. Not a big deal, though.

2. The installer hangs unpredictably when installing selinux-policy-targeted-2.4.6-203.el5.noarch.rpm. Performing a dozen or so installs, sometimes the rpm installs just fine, sometimes the installation takes 10 minutes, sometimes the installer just seems to hang and I kill virt-install after half an hour. An nfs kickstart install of a "real" machine does not exhibit this problem.

Excluding the package works, and installing it manually later gives: | ... | Installing : selinux-policy-targeted [2/2] | nagios homedir /var/spool/nagios or its parent directory conflicts with a | defined context in /etc/selinux/targeted/contexts/files/file_contexts, | /usr/sbin/genhomedircon will not create a new context. This usually indicates an incorrectly defined system account. If it is a system account please make sure its login shell is /sbin/nologin. | mysql homedir /usr/local or its parent directory conflicts with a | defined context in /etc/selinux/targeted/contexts/files/file_contexts, | /usr/sbin/genhomedircon will not create a new context. This usually indicates an incorrectly defined system account. If it is a system account please make sure its login shell is /sbin/nologin. | tomcat homedir /usr/local/jakarta-tomcat or its parent directory conflicts with a | defined context in /etc/selinux/targeted/contexts/files/file_contexts, | /usr/sbin/genhomedircon will not create a new context. This usually indicates an incorrectly defined system account. If it is a system account please make sure its login shell is /sbin/nologin. |

No packages related to nagios/mysql/tomcat are installed, this is a pretty stripped-down system.

On an identical vm that completed the installation successfully, the following is found in /root/install.log after the installation:

| Installing selinux-policy-targeted-2.4.6-203.el5.noarch | /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.60754: line 4: 1493 Killed semodule -b base.pp -i dnsmasq.pp -i ipsec.pp -i virt.pp -i pyzor.pp -i amavis.pp -i clamav.pp -i razor.pp -i dcc.pp -i nagios.pp -i evolution.pp -i mplayer.pp -i mozilla.pp -i ricci.pp -i oddjob.pp -i ccs.pp -i smartmon.pp -i iscsi.pp -i pcscd.pp -i prelude.pp -i zosremote.pp -i pki.pp -s targeted

I even ran this command manually after installation and it worked fine, with exit status 0.

Finally, here is the first part of the kickstart file, leaving out %packages and %post.

| install | url --url http://www/centos/i386 | lang en_US.UTF-8 | keyboard us | network --device eth0 --bootproto dhcp | rootpw --iscrypted $1$iMuKLiWQA$kljIOj097NBAD8SDlkjnmk | firewall --disabled | authconfig --enableshadow --enablemd5 --enablenis --nisdomain=localdomain | selinux --disabled | timezone --utc Eire | bootloader --location=mbr --driveorder=xvda | # Clear all partitions and create a single partition for / | # Note that no swap partition is created! VMs should *never* swap. | clearpart --all --initlabel | part / --fstype ext3 --size=100 --grow

Apologies for the lengthy posting :)