No mkisofs in RHEL6

I thought I would share my experience so others would not have to dig so hard.

Recently, I was trying to follow RH documentation to create a custom boot iso for kickstarting. All documentation says to use mkisofs to create the actual ISO. I have done this in the past without much problem. But I am now working on a RHEL6 system. When I went to run mkisofs I get "-bash: mkisofs: command not found".

To make a long story short, there is no mkisofs package available for RHEL6, nor cdrtools. (Nor cdrkit which was forked from cdrtools.) From my googling and wikipedia-ing, this seems to be because of a licensing change on cdrtools.

Anyways, RHEL6 replaces mkisofs with genisoimage. Yet, if you install the genisoimage package you will find that you now "have" mkisofs. But this is just a symlink. Multiple symlinks in fact:

lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 25 Jan  4 19:31 /usr/bin/mkisofs -> /etc/alternatives/mkisofs

lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 20 Jan  4 19:31 /etc/alternatives/mkisofs -> /usr/bin/genisoimage

-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 597264 Jun 21  2010 /usr/bin/genisoimage

I hope this helps anyone who is trying to follow a KB article or Doc and can't find mkisofs. Just yum install genisoimage and your good to go.

P.S. Red Hat, perhaps you can write a solution article explaining how to "get" mkisofs in RHEL6.x.

Thanks,

Jacob