Created attachment 877328 [details]
patch file which fixes /usr/share/rhn/server/handlers/xmlrpc/registration.py as a workaround

Description of problem:

In OpenVZ containers the registration process fails. Both server and
client packages are in version 2.1. On the client I get:

UPDATING RHN_REGISTER/UP2DATE CONFIGURATION FILES
-------------------------------------------------
* downloading necessary files
  client_config_update.py...
  client-config-overrides.txt...
* running the update scripts
  . up2date config file
 
* importing organizational GPG key
 
* attempting to install corporate public CA cert
 
REGISTRATION
------------
* registering
lscpu: failed to determine number of CPUs: /sys/devices/system/cpu/possible: No such file or directory
Error communicating with server. The message was:
Internal Server Error
 
*** Error: Registering the system failed.


On the server I see this in /var/log/httpd/error_log:
        
[Fri Mar 21 14:06:50 2014] [error] Exception Handler Information
[Fri Mar 21 14:06:50 2014] [error] Traceback (most recent call last):
[Fri Mar 21 14:06:50 2014] [error]   File
"/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/spacewalk/server/apacheRequest.py",
line 123, in call_function
[Fri Mar 21 14:06:50 2014] [error]     response = apply(func, params)
[Fri Mar 21 14:06:50 2014] [error]   File
"/usr/share/rhn/server/handlers/xmlrpc/registration.py", line 509, in
new_system
[Fri Mar 21 14:06:50 2014] [error]     architecture, data)
[Fri Mar 21 14:06:50 2014] [error]   File
"/usr/share/rhn/server/handlers/xmlrpc/registration.py", line 368, in
create_system
[Fri Mar 21 14:06:50 2014] [error]     parse_smbios(data['smbios'])
[Fri Mar 21 14:06:50 2014] [error]   File
"/usr/share/rhn/server/handlers/xmlrpc/registration.py", line 69, in
parse_smbios
[Fri Mar 21 14:06:50 2014] [error]     elif manufacturer.startswith('Red
Hat') and product == 'OpenStack Nova' and uuid is not None:
[Fri Mar 21 14:06:50 2014] [error] AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has
no attribute 'startswith'
[Fri Mar 21 14:06:50 2014] [error]


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
spacewalk-backend-xmlrpc-2.1.55-1.el6.noarch

How reproducible:
Every time when registering a CentOS 6.5 OpenVZ container image in spacewalk using the bootstrapscript.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a OpenVZ conatiner using the template from: http://download.openvz.org/template/precreated/centos-6-x86_64.tar.gz
2. Configure the the conatiners network interface and hostname
3. Start the container
4. Install all pending CentOS updates and spacewalk client packages
5. Run the spacewalk bootstrap script

Actual results:
The registration fails with a python exception on the spacewalk server.


Expected results:
The registration succeeds


Additional info:
I attached a patch file for /usr/share/rhn/server/handlers/xmlrpc/registration.py which fixes this issue as a workaround but I assume that the quality of the patch does not match the developers expectation :-)