I’ve just been trying to kickstart RHEL5 onto HP hardware (DL360-somthing-or-other) when using the Python SimpleHTTPServer to export my kickstart file and the distribution ISO. You can use the python SimpleHTTPServer module like this:
python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000
and it will start a daemon that listens on port 8000 and exposes the working directory hierarchy. This is nice because python comes by default on almost all Red Hat installs (you have to have a really small install to not get it either directly or as a dependency) and it means that you don’t have to have Apache if you just need a little HTTP action.
For some reason though, it wasn’t able to serve the boot.iso (so that I could mount it via the HP’s ILO virtual media facility) or some of the RPMs from the mounted OS ISO image. Instead it hung and then gave a stack trace when the client got bored:
----------------------------------------
myserver - - [05/Sep/2011 12:51:29] "GET /./Server/shadow-utils-4.0.17-14.el5.x86_64.rpm HTTP/1.1" 200 -
----------------------------------------
Exception happened during processing of request from ('10.10.10.10', 42126)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib64/python2.4/SocketServer.py", line 222, in handle_request
self.process_request(request, client_address)
File "/usr/lib64/python2.4/SocketServer.py", line 241, in process_request
self.finish_request(request, client_address)
File "/usr/lib64/python2.4/SocketServer.py", line 254, in finish_request
self.RequestHandlerClass(request, client_address, self)
File "/usr/lib64/python2.4/SocketServer.py", line 521, in __init__
self.handle()
File "/usr/lib64/python2.4/BaseHTTPServer.py", line 316, in handle
self.handle_one_request()
File "/usr/lib64/python2.4/BaseHTTPServer.py", line 310, in handle_one_request
method()
File "/usr/lib64/python2.4/SimpleHTTPServer.py", line 43, in do_GET
self.copyfile(f, self.wfile)
File "/usr/lib64/python2.4/SimpleHTTPServer.py", line 163, in copyfile
shutil.copyfileobj(source, outputfile)
File "/usr/lib64/python2.4/shutil.py", line 25, in copyfileobj
fdst.write(buf)
File "/usr/lib64/python2.4/socket.py", line 256, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/lib64/python2.4/socket.py", line 243, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
The same files were accessible using curl from the localhost, so I’m not quite sure what the cause was. Anyhow, rather than debug that, I did some hack’n’slashing on the Apache config to get the smallest config I could:
yum install -y httpd mkdir -p /tmp/repo/logs cat <<EOF > /tmp/repo/minimal.conf User apache Group apache LoadModule dir_module /usr/lib64/httpd/modules/mod_dir.so LoadModule autoindex_module /usr/lib64/httpd/modules/mod_autoindex.so Listen *:8000 ServerRoot /tmp/repo DocumentRoot /tmp/repo <Directory /tmp/repo> Options Indexes </Directory> EOF httpd -d /tmp/repo -f minimal.conf -k start
To clean up afterwards you’ve shared the files:
httpd -d /tmp/repo -f minimal.conf -k stop rm -rf /tmp/repo
This will serve up /tmp/repo and all of the subdirectories in a browsable fashion on port 8000. I would not recommend using this configuration to serve files for any length of time (the normal httpd configuration will do a much better job of that) – but it’s useful for a quick and dirty hack.