Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 243544
virt-install/virt-manager don't follow RFC 2224 for NFS mounts
Last modified: 2008-11-25 09:06:16 EST
Description of problem: Unlike the http and ftp based installation options, xen's guest creation tools don't follow a standard RFC-based nomenclature for specification of an NFS install location. The Red Hat documentation specifies properly what the current xen tools will accept. For example, nfs:nfsserver.example.com:/distro/files is what the tools expect. However, RFC 2224 specifies that the format should be nfs://nfsserver.example.com/distro/files . This format is based on RFC 1738 which defines the general format of all URLs. There is one intriguing side effect of using a RFC 2224 conformant URL with the existing tools - the tools then start mount.cifs - yes, that's right. They interpret the RFC 2224 compliant NFS mount location as a CIFS mount location. I find that especially interesting considering that Samba shares aren't an officially supported mechanism for xen guest installation sources. Must be a bug in a library somewhere. Should I file that as a separate bug? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): xen 3.1.0-0.rc7.1.fc7, probably others. How reproducible: Every time Steps to Reproduce: 1. Run either virt-manager or virt-install. 2. Respond with an RFC 2224 compliant URL for an NFS mount when asked for install location. 3. Run "ps aux" quickly thereafter and be amazed as a CIFS mount is attempted. 4. If running from virt-install, observe "Password:" prompt in whatever shell you started virt-install. Actual results: Failure. Expected results: NFS mount to complete and successful installation. Additional info:
Component changed due to a bit more analysis and a SWAG.
It's embarrassing that virt-inst gets this wrong. It should really handle a proper nfs URI. (e.g nfs://). Backward compatible is ok, but we shouldn't be confusing folks who use a properly formed nfs URI and find it fails. The severity should be higher, like perhaps medium.
Half a year old and still no answer on this - indeed still in "new" state. I'm disappointed.
The reason it expected 'nfs:' is because the URL is passed straight through to Anaconda as the install source. Since anaconda wanted non-RFC URIs, virt-install was made to match. We have since added support for installing other distros, and recently made virt-install support both nfs: and nfs:// and will auto-translate into the format required by anaconda. It'll be in the next release that is done http://hg.et.redhat.com/virt/applications/virtinst--devel?cs=be8457357ab2
That was a quick response! Thanks for the info. I'm still curious why only the NFS mount case has/had a non-RFC-compliant URI, whereas the http and ftp cases are/were already compliant. The second part of my bug report, namely mount.cifs being called when I tried a RFC-compliant URI for an NFS mount, still concerns me. Is this merely a side-effect of the mishandling of the RFC-compliant form of the NFS case, or something else?
The reason you were seeing mount.cifs seems to be a side effect of how we were parsing nfs locations. In order to install from an nfs source tree, we would mount the tree and grab a boot kernel. Since nfs uris were expected as nfs:server:/path/to/tree, we would chop off the 'nfs:' and pass the rest to the 'mount' command. In the case of 'nfs://' this left '//server:/path/to/server' which if you try with 'mount' defaults to using mount.cifs and gives a password prompt.
virt-manager-0.5.3-1.fc7, gtk-vnc-0.3.2-1.fc7, python-virtinst-0.300.2-1.fc7, virt-viewer-0.0.2-1.fc7 has been pushed to the Fedora 7 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report. If you want to test the update, you can install it with su -c 'yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update virt-manager gtk-vnc python-virtinst virt-viewer'
virt-manager-0.5.3-1.fc7, gtk-vnc-0.3.2-1.fc7, python-virtinst-0.300.2-1.fc7, virt-viewer-0.0.2-1.fc7 has been pushed to the Fedora 7 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
hmm, this still isn't RFC complete. now we can parse nfs:server:/path/to/tree and nfs://server:path/to/tree, but NOT nfs://server/path/to/tree which is needed for RFC compliance. Reopening this bug.
Full fix now upstream: http://hg.et.redhat.com/virt/applications/virtinst--devel?cs=aa3fe23be510 Putting bug in POST until we cut a new release and pull it into fedora.
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Since it is pretty late for F8, I'd rather not update the package for this non-critical feature that is in a known fragile code path (url munging and kernel fetching). This is fixed in F9 though, so closing as CURRENTRELEASE.