Description of problem: I have a working network-based Red Hat ES 4 kickstart which I built from the official RHES4 ISOs that I downloaded from RHN. If I retrieve updated RPMs with up2date and merge them into the kickstart tree then run genhdlist, the installer crashes with "install exited abnormally" after the "Preparing RPM Transactions" status box. genhdlist generates no errors when I run it. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES 4 anaconda-10.1.1.13-1 anaconda-runtime-10.1.1.13-1 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Merge updated RPMs into kickstart tree 2. Run genhdlist 3. Wait for kickstart to croak Actual results: Kickstart fails. Expected results: Successful kickstart. Additional info: This same bug appeared in FC3 when attempting to merge updates, but I wrote it off as a Fedora issue. It appears that something was carried over from FC3 into ES4 which is causing the same problem.
Created attachment 113686 [details] Kickstart Configuration File
Please provide the full command lines for your customisation process
I download the upgraded RPMs by running "up2date -duf" on a preinstalled Red Hat ES 4 server, then copy the RPMs out of /var/spool/up2date I copy the updated RPMs to the kickstart tree using a custom script that makes sure that there are no duplicate packages in the tree. I then run: # /usr/lib/anaconda-runtime/genhdlist /installs/linux/redhat/rhel4/ The kickstart is initiated via PXE boot with the following PXE Configuration: SERIAL 0 115200 0x303 PROMPT 0 LABEL linux KERNEL rhel4/vmlinuz APPEND ksdevice=eth0 ks=http://10.3.0.2/ks.cfg kssendmac lang=en_US text initrd=rhel4/initrd.img root=/dev/ram0 ramdisk_size=10240 selinux=disabled console=ttyS0,115200 console=tty0
Just a note, the same process works flawlessly with Red Hat ES 3
This isn't complete. You also need to generate a pkgorder and rerun genhdlist afterwards.