SYMPTOM

The installation of Icehouse on CentOS 6.5 using RDO quickstart fails initially when trying to find the erlang package.

PROBLEM

There is a bug in the packstack installation scripts that prevents the RDO Quickstart directions from working on:

CentOS-6.5-x86_64-minimal.iso  or CentOS-6.5-x86_64-bin-DVD1.iso
VMware Workstation 10 
(NOTE: Done without NTP or DNS (used hostfile))

The issue is the packstack script that handles part of the yum processing, doesn't handle CentOS. It is looking for Fedora, Redhat, etc. The fix is easy, though it was about as painful to find as watching the Titanic was with my wife and her friend, um... anyway it is here:

/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/packstack/plugins/serverprep_001.py
    def manage_epel(host, config)
        """
        Installs and/or enables EPEL repo if it is required or disables it if it 
        is not required.
        """
        if config['HOST_DETAILS'][host]['os'] in ('Fedora', 'Unknown'):
          return

SOLUTION

Changing the if clause corrected the "product feature":

        if config['HOST_DETAILS'][host]['os'] in ('Fedora', 'CentOS', 'Unknown'):

NOTE: I had also changed the redhat-releases file to try to work around the issue. After changing this line, I had to change that file back to the initial state rather than mimicing the redhat equivallent.

This changes causes CentOS to abort the function early (like Fedora) and prevents epel from turning off.

There is another lovely issue that I fixed outside the code where it create the following file:

/etc/yum/pluginconf.d/priorities.conf
    enabled = 1

I simply reset this to 0. When enabled, it blocked a number of repositories that were desirable. Grrr.

FOLLOW UP

There are other scripts that might need touched that I haven't examined. The following command gives the areas that need to be looked at with:

find /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages -name "*.py" -exec grep -l HOST_DETAIL '{}' \; | xargs grep HOST_DETAIL

RUN SCRIPT TO RECREATE THE PROBLEM

The full steps are here. Also note this is a throw away server (i.e no NTP, uses DHCP, etc) You can also look here to glean more though it appears the bug didn't occur in the version the author was installing: http://itinsteps.blogspot.in/2014/06/...

A Install OS (CentOS-6.5-x86_64-bin-DVD1.iso)

B Turn on networking

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
  BOOTPROTO=dhcp
  And it is on
service network restart

C UPDATE HOST FILE IF VM AND NO DNS

DEPRECATED STEP

 D UPDATE THE RELEASES FILE (Caused trouble as it was looking for RedHat, not CentOS)

      /etc/redhat-release: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.5
      cat /etc/redhat-release.OLD: CentOS release 6.5 (Final)
      Reboot

E UNINSTALL MYSQL (comes with CentOS 6.5 min)

yum remove mysql\*
yum install cron\*

F INSTALL EPEL (per Prerequisites) AND repoquery to show erlang problem

yum install wget
wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm; rpm -ivh epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm; 
yum install yum-utils

G DETERMINE IF ERLANG EXISTS AND IF SO WHERE

repoquery -i erlang
  Name : Erlang
  Version : R14B
  Release : 04.3.e16 ...