[CentOS] Strange behaviour from http install

MrKiwi
Tue, 22 May 2007 03:38:48 -0000

The Symptoms;
============
While watching a CentOS5 install hammer my webserver ( i
used "askmethod' to point the machine to the webserver) i
noticed a bunch of 404s;

10.1.1.119 - - [22/May/2007:15:01:53 +1200] "GET
/cd/1/CentOS/termcap-5.5-1.20060701.1.noarch.rpm HTTP/1.1"
404 319 "-" "urlgrabber/3.1.0"

and the installation failed to get started (the same file
re-requested over and over)

The Cause:
=========
I had set my webserver up to serve the iso for centos 5 on
/cd/0 and the sme_server7 iso on /cd/1 and the centos 4 iso
on /cd/2 (/cd/3 is there, but not mounted to anything)

Even though i used
server : 10.1.1.8
path : cd/0
the centos 5 installation (anakonda?) seems to have gone up
a folder, seen the 1,2,3 dirs and asked for .discinfo on the
following paths;
/cd/0
/cd/1
/cd/2
/cd/3

Upon finding .discinfo in folders /2 and /3 it has then got
all confused (not enough to crash as both sme server and
centos 4 are familiar file structures i guess?) and then
asked the server for wrong versions of files (again and
again in an endless loop)

Removing the confusion ( umount /var/www/html/cd/1 ;umount
/var/www/html/cd/2 ) solved the problem and everything went
smooth after that

Just thought i would let people know :)
Out of curiousity, does anyone know the cause of this? I
imagine it is some kind of fuzzy logic to do its best to
recover from paths that are one folder too short/long, or
maybe to make sure it is installing the highest version
numbered folder?


MrKiwi