Bug 640106

1. Customer Name: Union Pacific 

2. What is the nature and description of the request? When putting code into the snippets there is no checking on what could possibly be causing an issue. The only way to confirm if a snippet works is by actually kickstarting a system. 

3. Why does the customer need this? (List the business requirements here) Takes too long to debug code in snippets. There should be some inherent error checking. 

4. How would the customer like to achieve this? (List the functional requirements here) An update to RHN-Satellite. 

5. For each functional requirement listed in question 4, specify how Red Hat and the customer can test to confirm the requirement is successfully implemented. Customer can purposefully code a snippet wrong (leaving out quotation marks, variable naming wrong, etc) and it will check the code for errors. 

6. Is there already an existing RFE upstream or in Red Hat bugzilla? BZ605743 opened by GPS when on-site for Satellite upgrade engagement. 

7. How quickly does this need resolved? (desired target release) next release of Satellite. (5.4.z) 

8. Does this request meet the RHEL Inclusion criteria (please review) yes 

9. List the affected packages. unknown.


Description of problem: 
Post scripts fail if there is any kind of error in a snippet. 
Sadly, there is no error log of why they failed. 
This makes troubleshooting a complete nightmare and some customers are even afraid to use snippets do to this failure. 

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 5.3.0 

How reproducible: 
Create a snippet with a missing "'" or incorrect configuration. For example "sed -i /eth0.//' /etc/sysconfig/network will cause post to fail. 
There is no error about why. It just simply won't run anything in post. 

Steps to Reproduce: 

1. mess up a snippet slightly, but not enough for the template error to come up. 
2. Kickstart a system. 
3. Wonder why none of the 5 or 6 post snippets worked. 

Actual results: Unknown failure and then you have to kickstart a machine with one snippet at a time until you find the bad snippet, then you have to look at every line. 

Expected results: An error message. A little bit of the "error on line #" Or maybe at least, error with snippet('spacewalk/1/X') 

Additional info: It would also be nice if there was a way to have cheetah or anaconda test the snippets so we don't have to install a machine (15 minutes) then check and see if the post worked.