[CentOS-devel] CentOS and rhn tools

Fri Dec 17 14:58:33 UTC 2010
Florian CROUZAT <gentoo at floriancrouzat.net>

> > Do rhn tools becomes available in future versions of CentOS (CentOS 5.6,
> > CentOS 6...) ?
>
> If you Kickstart your systems through Spacewalk (that's what it's
> meant for) you can associate a Channel containing the Tools to the
> Kickstart Profile.
>
> The packages in there will be available during installation phase
> (before system registration) as well. So there is not need for having
> them in CentOS.

1/ One thing I don't understand is that spacewalk automagically appends this
kind of %post code in my kickstarts:
"rhnreg_ks --serverUrl=https:// ..." to register the newly kickstarted VM,
which is fine because I want that.
But the thing is, rhn* tools aren't installed automatically, breaking the
registration process, of course.
Why spacewalk produce a code that assumes things are there when they aren't
is the first thing I don't get.

2/ The next step for me was "It's simple, I'll add this packages
(rhn-client-tools, etc) in my %packages part", sadly,
it doesn't work either because it doesn't know the centos-5-spacewalk-client
repo, even though it's a child repo from
the activation key I checked. ==> Of course it didn't worked because if I
understand this correctly,
my activation key is only used to register my VM, allowing me to access the
[child]repos linked to this key
and it's only in these repos that the command "rhnreg_ks" is available !
There's a "who comes first" problem here, no ?

I finally got the auto registration to work by manually checking the child
repos I needed to make the rhn* rpms available in %packages
(even though the tips says one shouldn't because it will be overridden by
the activation key, but because of problem 2/ it doesn't).
Using this, I finally got my VM to register.... yay :|

Florian.