Customer ran into same issue and verified patch on Satellite 5.3. Cloning spacewalk bug to ensure it's inclusion in Satellite 5.4.0.

+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #467281 +++

Created an attachment (id=320579)
screenshot

Description of problem:

If a customer is using a base channels other than official rhel channels they will run into a problem when using our "enable config management" tool.

The satellite will look for a specific network tools channel associated with a base channel.  If the sat admin creates a child tools channel w/ anything other than what satellite is expecting.. the function will not work.

see screenshot for webui view of function

--- Additional comment from jesusr on 2009-02-24 15:32:16 EST ---

What if we add another attribute to a channel that indicates it's relationship instead of using the channel labels? This would make it more flexible for other use cases which are similar.

--- Additional comment from clasohm on 2009-06-10 09:10:50 EDT ---

I encountered this problem while doing a Spacewalk 0.5 installation. The customer created a base channel from a RHEL 5.3 copy and a child channel with the label "rhel5-server-x86_64-rhn-tools".

rhnreg_ks printed this error during Kickstart installation:

An error has occurred:
Internal Server Error
See /var/log/up2date for more information

The same error was printed by rhn_check when we ran it after the reboot. The Web UI showed a couple of pending events for the system.

In /var/log/httpd/error_log, we got this:

Exception Handler Information
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/rhn/server/apacheRequest.py", line 120, in call_function
    response = apply(func, params)
  File "/usr/share/rhn/server/handlers/xmlrpc/queue.py", line 283, in get
    ret = self.__getV2(action)
  File "/usr/share/rhn/server/handlers/xmlrpc/queue.py", line 89, in __getV2
    result = method(self.server_id, action['id'])
  File "/usr/share/rhn/server/action/kickstart_host.py", line 29, in add_tools_channel
    subscribe_to_tools_channel(server_id)
  File "/usr/share/rhn/server/rhnChannel.py", line 2379, in subscribe_to_tools_channel
    raise NoToolsChannel("Base channel id %s does not have a RHN Tools channel as a child channel." % \
NoToolsChannel: Base channel id 130 does not have a RHN Tools channel as a child channel.

As a quick workaround, I patched /usr/share/rhn/server/rhnChannel.py from spacewalk-backend-server-0.5.34-1.el5:

--- /usr/share/rhn/server/rhnChannel.py.orig    2009-06-10 14:25:54.000000000 +0200
+++ /usr/share/rhn/server/rhnChannel.py 2009-06-10 14:28:15.000000000 +0200
@@ -2372,7 +2372,7 @@
     tools_channel = None
     for channel in child_channels:
         if channel.has_key('label'):
-            if channel['label'].find('rhn-tools') == 0:
+            if channel['label'].find('rhn-tools') != -1:
                 tools_channel = channel
 
     if tools_channel is None:

This allows the "rhn-tools" keyword to be anywhere in the label, instead of forcing it to be at the start.

--- Additional comment from pkilambi on 2009-07-31 13:08:05 EDT ---

commit 0bcf3672c1a4fd995b8bcec6fe12ea3b91eda1f8
Author: Pradeep Kilambi <pkilambi>
Date:   Fri Jul 31 13:05:49 2009 -0400

    467281 - Instead of checking for the start now we check if tools is in the channel label. This is not a perfect solution but at least covers few more cases. An ideal solution would be to add some kind of a relation ship between parent and child signifying that this is a tools channel for a given parent.

--- Additional comment from msuchy on 2009-09-10 08:04:57 EDT ---

Spacewalk 0.6 released