Bug 1043318

Summary: broken symlinks for iso directory are imported
Product: [Retired] Beaker Reporter: Dan Callaghan <dcallagh>
Component: lab controllerAssignee: beaker-dev-list
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX QA Contact: tools-bugs <tools-bugs>
Severity: unspecified Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 0.15CC: atodorov, qwan, tools-bugs
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Triaged
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Hardware: Unspecified   
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Last Closed: 2020-10-21 14:14:38 UTC Type: Bug
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Dan Callaghan 2013-12-15 23:08:25 UTC 
Some trees contains a symlink for their iso/ directory, linking to an absolute path under /mnt. This is a broken symlink under normal circumstances but it is served correctly by the HTTP/FTP mirror servers because they have the necessary mounts which the symlink is assuming.

$ ls -al /net/example.com/vol/engineering/devarchive/redhat/rel-eng/RHEL6.5-20131213.0/6/Server/ppc64/
total 180
drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root 172032 Dec 13 11:06 debug
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root     58 Dec 13 11:46 iso -> /mnt/redhat/iso/work/RHEL6.5-20131213.0/6/Server/ppc64/iso
drwxrwsr-x. 2 root root   4096 Dec 13 11:46 jigdo
drwxr-xr-x. 8 root root   4096 Dec 13 11:18 os

In this case, beaker-import imports an nfs+iso:// URL successfully, but it is not usable by Anaconda since it will see the link as broken over NFS, and it causes beaker-expire-distros to complain constantly about the URL being missing.
Comment 3 Nick Coghlan 2013-12-15 23:45:37 UTC 
The failure mode would actually be worse if NFS *did* allow symlinks spanning to other mounted volumes: we could end up trying to do a provision over the WAN.

Time for a new architecture guide section on distro import, storage and URLs, perhaps? Bug 978824 touches on this.
Comment 4 Dan Callaghan 2014-04-13 22:04:14 UTC 
I think we need to do something about this soon (even if it's just a hack in the existing import script, rather than a nicer solution using the recursive importer we had planned). It causes a huge amount of cron spam and we regularly import distros that are not installable due to the symlink.