New Distro Install Woes

Building a new distro in the Rackspace Cloud, CentOS 6.5. I have done this a thousand times, but it seems that maybe their image has changed as I have to do some initial commands that I haven’t had to before (yum installing nano, for instance).

Anyway, when I run the 5.211-65-1 distro install script, it completes and asks that I reboot. When I reboot, it seems the install is not completed. I cannot access the web interface, typing ‘asterisk’ in the CLI gets me an “unknown command” message.

From what I am able to glean throughout the on-screen install prompts, I continue to see errors like “user/group asterisk:asterisk not found, using root” or something similar.

SELinux is disabled.

Any thoughts? Let me know where to look for logs and I’ll post them.

Thanks,
Preston

Here is an example of the strange errors at the end of the script:

chown: invalid user: `asterisk:asterisk’

Moving to Next Step

Enable and update all FreePBX Modules
Enable modules that in 2.11 are not being enabled from the RPM
sudo: unknown user: asterisk
sudo: unable to initialize policy plugin
sudo: unknown user: asterisk
sudo: unable to initialize policy plugin
sudo: unknown user: asterisk
sudo: unable to initialize policy plugin

Sounds like their kickstart or installer missed some stuff.

  1. Try to re-run the installer to make sure this isn’t an isolated incident.
  2. Open a ticket with rackspace so they can look in to it.

Thanks, James. I’ve re-imaged and re-run the installer multiple times so I know it’s not isolated. I will open a ticket with Rackspace. How would you suggest I frame the issue with them?

incomplete install. Missing packages.

Is there anything I can do to debug this or better pinpoint where the error(s) are occurring? Rackspace is playing stupid so I need to point to something specific or they won’t help me.

Thanks so much in advance.

Hi, sorry you are having trouble with the script.

When I read these posts of people having issues with generic hosting provider it causes me great confusion.

You may know me from the forums but if you have not been to the Sponsor’s page it may not be obvious what the connection is. My company provides high quality commercial FreePBX hosting. Our virtual servers were set up and by the Schmooze Engineers and we are “on net” with the same backbone as SIPStation.

We are not the least expensive but for the price of a hamburger you get a team dedicated to FreePBX hosting with wonderful connections and we even offer VPN termination to take the worry out of security and NAT issues.

If you are interested in a smooth transition to hosted please drop me a PM and I can get you in touch with my team.

Best Regards

Hi, sorry you are having trouble with the script.

When I read these posts of people having issues with generic hosting provider it causes me great confusion.

You may know me from the forums but if you have not been to the Sponsor’s page it may not be obvious what the connection is. My company provides high quality commercial FreePBX hosting. Our virtual servers were set up and by the Schmooze Engineers and we are “on net” with the same backbone as SIPStation.

We are not the least expensive but for the price of a hamburger you get a team dedicated to FreePBX hosting with wonderful connections and we even offer VPN termination to take the worry out of security and NAT issues.

If you are interested in a smooth transition to hosted please drop me a PM and I can get you in touch with my team.

Best Regards

Hi, sorry you are having trouble with the script.

When I read these posts of people having issues with generic hosting provider it causes me great confusion.

You may know me from the forums but if you have not been to the Sponsor’s page it may not be obvious what the connection is. My company provides high quality commercial FreePBX hosting. Our virtual servers were set up and by the Schmooze Engineers and we are “on net” with the same backbone as SIPStation.

We are not the least expensive but for the price of a hamburger you get a team dedicated to FreePBX hosting with wonderful connections and we even offer VPN termination to take the worry out of security and NAT issues.

If you are interested in a smooth transition to hosted please drop me a PM and I can get you in touch with my team.

Best Regards

Are you running these scripts as a root user and does rackspace allow you to run as root and installed any package and kernel you want and create new users.

Really sounds like they have locked things down.

Yes, I am running as root user. KVM environment. Also running the script right after clean install. What is weird is that I’ve done this multiple times for clients utilizing the Rackspace Cloud. They’ve changed something, but I can’t pinpoint it without showing them exactly where it is failing…

Skyking–good to know and thanks for the heads up. This client has their entire infrastructure on Rackspace Cloud but I will keep it in mind for the future.

Well not sure what to tell you. Something is broke and not sure I would try and use a VPS provider that does not support the project and not designed for voice.

Here is the response from Rackspace:

"I ran this test myself on a brand new CentOS 6.5 server from our image and found the problem. It’s not with our image. What is happening is that the script is removing the base CentOS repository mirrors and replacing them with FreePBX ones. That in itself is not the problem, however, it looks like their repositories are a little behind the standard CentOS ones, for sure when it comes to the mysql-libs package. The newest version available from CentOS (and that is in our image) is mysql-libs-5.1.73-3.el6_5.i686.rpm and mysql-libs-5.1.73-3.el6_5.x86_64.rpm whereas the FreePBX mirror only has versions mysql-libs-5.1.71-1.el6.i686.rpm and mysql-libs-5.1.71-1.el6.x86_64.rpm.

The problem occurs because apparently the FreePBX system needs both i686 and x86_64 libraries installed. Our image only has the x86_64 one installed so when the script changes the repository and then tries to install the mysql-libs.i686 yum encounters that version mismatch and rightfully prevents that installation from occurring. I’m certain that CentOS will not consider downgrading the version of mysql-libs for FreePBX, so this will have to be taken up with the maintainers of FreePBX so they are made aware that this mismatch between what’s in CentOS 6.5 repositories now is conflicting with what’s in their repositories. I imagine they ideally should be mirrors, especially if it’s expected to work on any CentOS release. At some point in the recent past (within the last month) they have fallen out of date."

Also, this might be related to the post near the bottom of the sticky thread here:

http://www.freepbx.org/forum/distro-discussion-help/how-to-convert-a-stock-centos-6x-to-the-freepbx-distro

Ok well not sure this is anything we are going to work on resolving as we no longer use CentOS direct due to legal and trademark reasons. We update frequently our packages but no longer is our Distro managed right from CentOS repos.

I just did a fresh install of CentOS 6.5 ISO right from CentOS of their 64bit and they include both the 32bit and the 64bit packages in the installer. Also the installed ISO right from CentOS is using mysql-libs-5.1.71-1 so it would appear that Rackspace is the using a modified CentOS with newer packages. Meaning they are updating packages on their version of CentOS 6.5 that are newer then what the stock ISO from CentOS has which is what these scripts are built to run against.

The CentOS repos do have updated MySQL packages in the update repo but you have to yum update to get those after the install of the ISO.

Ok, I’m beginning to understand what is going on here I think. Yes, the Rackspace image is newer than the 6.5 ISO, but it is not modified in any way–just a newer build.

Why does the FreePBX update repository not contain the updated mysql-libs package that is in all the other CentOS mirrors? If they did, a simple yum update would get the script past this issue.

Help me understand.

Thanks,
Preston

As stated already we are not using CentOS direct anymore. We had to move to our own OS for copyright reasons that CentOS brought up. Secondly it takes us a few weeks to test all new items published to make sure they do not break more things. Yes we do not catch everything but we catch and patch enough things that would create problems on your PBX Appliance.