Troubleshooting Clients

Bare Metal Systems

If a bare metal system on the network is not automatically added to the Systems list, check these things first:

  • You must have the pxe-default-image package installed.

  • File paths and parameters must be configured correctly. Check that the vmlinuz0 and initrd0.img files, which are provided by pxe-default-image, are in the locations specified in the rhn.conf configuration file.

  • Ensure the networking equipment connecting the bare metal system to the SUSE Manager server is working correctly, and that you can reach the SUSE Manager server IP address from the server.

  • The bare metal system to be provisioned must have PXE booting enabled in the boot sequence, and must not be attempting to boot an operating system.

  • The DHCP server must be responding to DHCP requests during boot. Check the PXE boot messages to ensure that:

    • the DHCP server is assigning the expected IP address

    • the DHCP server is assigning the the SUSE Manager server IP address as next-server for booting.

  • Ensure Cobbler is running, and that the Discovery feature is enabled.

If you see a blue Cobbler menu shortly after booting, discovery has started. If it does not complete successfully, temporarily disable automatic shutdown in order to help diagnose the problem. To disable automatic shutdown:

  1. Select pxe-default-profile in the Cobbler menu with the arrow keys, and press the Tab key before the timer expires.

  2. Add the kernel boot parameter spacewalk-finally=running using the integrated editor, and press Enter to continue booting.

  3. Enter a shell with the username root and password linux to continue debugging.

Duplicate profiles

Due to a technical limitation, it is not possible to reliably distinguish a new bare metal system from a system that has previously been discovered. Therefore, we recommended that you do not power on bare metal systems multiple times, as this will result in duplicate profiles.

Cloned Salt Clients

If you have used your hypervisor clone utility, and attempted to register the cloned Salt client, you might get this error:

We're sorry, but the system could not be found.

This is caused by the new, cloned, system having the same machine ID as an existing, registered, system. You can adjust this manually to correct the error and register the cloned system successfully.

For more information and instructions, see administration:tshoot-registerclones.adoc.

Mounting /tmp with noexec

Salt runs remote commands from /tmp on the client’s filesystem. Therefore you must not mount /tmp with the noexec option.

SSL errors

On SLES 11 systems, clients can sometimes have SSL errors which make some operations unusable, including package management and bootstrapping. In this case, you will see an error like this:

Repository 'SLES11-SP4-SUSE-Manager-Tools x86_64' is invalid.
[|] Valid metadata not found at specified URL(s)
Please check if the URIs defined for this repository are pointing to a valid repository.
Skipping repository 'SLES11-SP4-SUSE-Manager-Tools x86_64' because of the above error.
Download (curl) error for 'www.example.com':
Error code: Unrecognized error
Error message: error:1409442E:SSL routines:SSL3_READ_BYTES:tlsv1 alert protocol version

This occurs because Apache requires TLS v1.2, but older versions of SLES do not support this version of the TLS protocol. To fix this error, you need to force Apache to accept a greater range of protocol versions. Open the /etc/apache2/ssl-global.conf configuration file, locate the SSLProtocol line, and update it to read:

SSLProtocol all -SSLv2 -SSLv3

This will need to be done manually on the server, and with a Salt state on the Proxy. Restart the apache service on each system after making the changes.