[tools] mrepo, RHEL 5 and rhnget

[Dag Wieers]

On Fri, 11 May 2007, Frédéric PICA wrote:

> 2007/5/11, Dag Wieers <dag at wieers.com>:
> > On Fri, 11 May 2007, Frédéric PICA wrote:
> >
> > > I'm currently trying to mirror on rhel 5, but I'm getting this in rhnget:
> > >
> > > ImportError: cannot import name wrapperUtils
> > > mrepo: Mirroring failed for rhns:///rhel-i386-server-5 with message:
> > >  Failed with return code: 256
> > >
> > > I think it's because they removed up2date from rhel 5.
> >
> > mrepo does not work (yet) on RHEL5. RHEL5 ships with the up2date codebase
> > that mrepo uses, but is has been heavily modified (possibly to work with
> > Yum they removed everything that was no longer required).
> >
> > Because of that the current mrepo rhnget implementation fails to work with
> > RHEL5, but does work with RHEL4 and RHEL3. (maybe RHEL2.1)
> >
> > My aim is to replace the reliance on the up2date codebase and implement
> > the RHN protocol myself using xmlrpc directly, however since it is not
> > documented it is harder to do.
> >
> >
> > > Is it possible to create a mirror for rhel5 under a rhel4 system ?
> >
> > Yes, I advise to use mrepo on a RHEL4 or RHEL3 system instead until we
> > make mrepo work on RHEL5. A new implementation of RHN/xmlrpc would also
> > allow us to run mrepo on other distributions.
>
> Ok, did you already have a timeline for having mrepo working under rhel5 ?
> It will help us making a good decision (waiting for the newer mrepo, do not
> upgrading our mirror server to rhel5, ...)

The RHN/xmlrpc implementation is something that requires at least a week 
of fulltime development and that is currently something I cannot do. I'm 
currently without a job (and converting to become self-employed) and 
looking for new work. Until that happens I cannot afford to spend that 
much time on mrepo.


> In waiting, I've tried that :
> I've extracted /usr/share/rhn from an up2date coming from rhel4 to another
> directory, and I have modified the path inclusion in rhnget to import python
> from that directory and not from /usr/share/rhn.
> 
> Now I'm having this :
> No rhnuuid config option found in /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date-uuid.
> rhnget: 1
> 
> Where can I get this uuid from a rhel5 system ? Or did you know how I can
> generate a new one ?
> Is it related to the systemid ?

Good question. I think it used to be autogenerated when doing the up2date 
install (guess). The content looks like this:

	uuid[comment]=Universally Unique ID for this server
	rhnuuid=XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX

Where the uuid can be generated by doing:

	uuidgen

I'm interested to learn if that worked. Thanks for your investigation, it 
is very much appreciated :)

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]