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Making Cobbler work with SElinux on CentOS / RHEL 6

By default, Cobbler will not work properly on a CentOS / RHEL 6 machine with SElinux enabled. The easy way out is to disable SElinux entirely, but I prefer to write a custom policy instead – it is not that difficult.

The basic approach is this:

Use Cobbler as you normally would (you will trigger several SElinux denials, so expect errors)
Extract the relevant SElinux audit messages; convert them into a local policy
Load your local policy
Repeat steps 1..3 until everything works as expected

First attempt: the “cobbler import” command fails; rsync cannot access files on the mounted DVD ISO. Time to start writing a [...]

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Tip: Importing multiple CentOS Linux DVDs into Cobbler

Linux distributions are getting larger and larger; CentOS 6.0 64-bit won’t fit on a single DVD anymore. A Cobbler-based provisioning server will normally import only one DVD. So, how do you get around this?

Import the first DVD as usual
Manually add content from the second DVD

Import the first DVD (ISO image):

mkdir /mnt/dvd1; mount -o ro,loop /tmp/CentOS-6.0-x86_64-bin-DVD1.iso /mnt/dvd1

DISTRO=centos60-x86_64
cobbler import –name=${DISTRO} –path=/mnt/dvd1

Watch the output from Cobbler closely – it will basically tell show you the commands you need to import the second DVD

Import the second DVD (ISO image):

mkdir /mnt/dvd2; mount -o ro,loop /tmp/CentOS-6.0-x86_64-bin-DVD2.iso [...]

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