Cobbler import failing

Question

I've been playing with Cobbler lately (on a CentOS 7 distrib), and I've gone through an error while importing a CentOS 7 iso. I've been able to find a work around to the problem, and I thought it'd be cool to share what I learnt.

Here's the issue in question:

$ sudo mount -t iso9660 -o loop,ro CentOS-7-x86_64-DVD-1503-01.iso /mnt
$ sudo cobbler import --name=centos7 --arch=x86_64 --path=/mnt
task started: 2015-05-29_144409_import
task started (id=Media import, time=Fri May 29 14:44:09 2015)
Exception occured: <class 'cobbler.cexceptions.CX'>
Exception value: 'Command failed'
Exception Info:
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cobbler/remote.py", line 87, in run
    rc = self._run(self)
   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cobbler/remote.py", line 231, in runner
    self.logger
   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cobbler/api.py", line 892, in import_tree
    utils.run_this(rsync_cmd, (spacer, mirror_url, path), self.logger)
   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cobbler/utils.py", line 917, in run_this
    die(logger,"Command failed")
   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cobbler/utils.py", line 134, in die
    raise CX(msg)

!!! TASK FAILED !!!

and here is the corresponding /var/log/cobbler/cobbler.log excerpt

Fri May 29 14:44:09 2015 - DEBUG | REMOTE expiring token; user(<DIRECT>)
Fri May 29 14:44:09 2015 - DEBUG | REMOTE expiring token; user(<DIRECT>)
Fri May 29 14:44:09 2015 - DEBUG | REMOTE expiring token; user(<DIRECT>)
Fri May 29 14:44:09 2015 - DEBUG | REMOTE CLI Authorized; user(?)
Fri May 29 14:44:09 2015 - INFO | REMOTE start_task(Media import); event_id(2015-05-29_144409_import); user(?)
Fri May 29 14:44:10 2015 - INFO | import_tree; ['/mnt', 'centos7', None, None, None]
Fri May 29 14:44:10 2015 - INFO | importing from a network location, running rsync to fetch the files first
Fri May 29 14:44:10 2015 - INFO | running: rsync -a  '/mnt/' /var/www/cobbler/ks_mirror/centos7-x86_64 --progress
Fri May 29 14:44:10 2015 - INFO | received on stdout: sending incremental file list
images/pxeboot/
images/pxeboot/initrd.img
       32768   0%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00
Fri May 29 14:44:10 2015 - DEBUG | received on stderr:
rsync: writefd_unbuffered failed to write 4 bytes to socket [sender]: Broken pipe (32)
rsync: write failed on "/var/www/cobbler/ks_mirror/centos7-x86_64/images/pxeboot/initrd.img": No space left on device (28)
rsync error: error in file IO (code 11) at receiver.c(322) [receiver=3.0.9]
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (40 bytes received so far) [sender]
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(605) [sender=3.0.9]

Fri May 29 14:44:10 2015 - INFO | Exception occured: <class 'cobbler.cexceptions.CX'>
Fri May 29 14:44:10 2015 - INFO | Exception value: 'Command failed'
Fri May 29 14:44:10 2015 - INFO | Exception Info:
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cobbler/utils.py", line 126, in die
    raise CX(msg)

Line rsync: write failed on "/var/www/cobbler/ks_mirror/centos7-x86_64/images/pxeboot/initrd.img": No space left on device (28) says there's no more space on /var. I think the initrd.img file created by Cobbler is too big for my /var partition which is only 4GB.

Answer 1

Answering my own question

My filesystem is XFS, on top of LVM partitions. The best solution was to resize /var partition so that it has enough space to support the rsync operations. The thing is when I installed CentOS 7 on this machine I've allocated all the available disk space, so there was no free space to enlarge /var.

So I decided to move /var/www/cobbler on the root partition, by moving it to /usr

$ sudo mkdir -p /usr/var/www
$ sudo mv /var/www/cobbler /usr/var/www/

Then, I created a symbolic link:

$ cd /var/www
$ sudo ln -sd /usr/var/www/cobbler

Now, when performing cobbler import, rsync writes on the root partition, which has enough space to support it, and everything works fine.

Answer 2

Incomplete iso image downloads is also issue for such errors. Please ensure to do checksum check on the iso image