[CentOS] CentOS 5 sysreport

Tue Dec 11 16:46:31 UTC 2007
Alfred von Campe <alfred at von-campe.com>

I stumbled across this issue because I requested to install the  
sysreport package in my kickstart file.  Anaconda complains that such  
a package doesn't exist.  There is a bug report about this already  
(http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=2492), but it's certainly a  
strange situation.

   1. Anaconda doesn't think the package sysreport exists

   2. yum thinks it exists:
         # yum list sysreport
         Loading "installonlyn" plugin
         Setting up repositories
         Reading repository metadata in from local files
         Available Packages
         sysreport.noarch         1.4.3-13.el5      base

   3. But installing with yum fails:
         # yum install sysreport
         Loading "installonlyn" plugin
         Setting up Install Process
         Setting up repositories
         Reading repository metadata in from local files
         Parsing package install arguments
         Package sos - 1.7-9.1.el5.noarch already installed and  
latest version
         Nothing to do

   4. The sysreport file from the sos package fails to run:
         # sysreport
         Traceback (most recent call last):
           File "/usr/sbin/sysreport", line 31, in ?
             import sos.policyredhat
         ImportError: No module named sos.policyredhat

   5. But if you extract /usr/sbin/sysreport from the sysreport  
package using
      rpm2cpio for instance, it works just fine.

So it would be nice if yum would allow installing the sysreport  
package (see step 3 above) as that would appear to solve all the  
problems.

Alfred