New features in Satellite 5.8

Redhat Satellite 5 was released in version 5.8. based on Spacewalk 2.5. It will probably be the last upgrade available, Support ends in January 2019.

New features and enhancements

• The major new feature is the introduction of support for the CDN for both, Satellite activation and content sync. The key benefit is a massively enhanced performance for content sync. It’s now called cdn-sync, not satellite-sync anymore. Be aware that some custom scripts as well as cronjobs must be updated as well.This change also introduces the usage of Satellite Manifests instead of the old Certificates
• Introduction of the new CLI tool taskotop which allows you to watch the activity of the Taskomatic Daemon.
• PostgreSQL is upgraded to 9.5 which brings, compared to 9.2, some performance improvements as well.
• More Perl bits have been rewritten to Java
• Java JRE is now IBM’s Version 1.8
• A few new commands in the spacecmd CLI
• Lots of bugfixes and small enhancements

Removed features

There are some features that have been dropped with this release.

• Support for Patch management of Solaris Systems. Who was using that? I can not remember that I’ve seen a company using that feature.
• Monitoring is gone as well, I only know one organization that have used that feature. Most companies are using Icinga or Nagios.

Usange of cdn-sync

Populate Repository Metadata

The listing of available channels is working off-line. To be able to see the number of packages assigned to which channels you need to download the repository metadata first.

[root@sat58 ~]# cdn-sync --count-packages
14:05:25 Number of channels: 1271
14:05:25 Number of repositories: 1456
Downloading repomd:   |##################################################| 100.0% 
Comparing repomd:     |##################################################| 100.0% 
Downloading metadata: |##################################################| 100.0% 
Counting packages:    |##################################################| 100.0% 
14:42:21 Total time: 0:36:56
[root@sat58 ~]# 

Be aware that this will take a while, depending on how many entitlements are defined in the Satellite Manifest.

To keep that data up to date you should add a cronjob to do so.

[root@sat58 ~]# echo '0 1 * * * perl -le "sleep rand 9000" && /usr/bin/cdn-sync --count-packages' >> /etc/cron.d/cdn-sync-populate-metadata

Initial content sync

Similar to the old satellity-sync you provide the parameter -c repeatedly for all repos to be synced.

[root@sat58 ~]# cdn-sync -c rhel-x86_64-server-7              
11:16:20 ======================================
11:16:20 | Channel: rhel-x86_64-server-7
11:16:20 ======================================
11:16:20 Sync of channel started.
11:16:20 Repo URL: https://cdn.redhat.com/content/dist/rhel/server/7/7Server/x86_64/os
11:16:28 Packages in repo:             14275
11:16:41 Packages already synced:          0
11:16:41 Packages to sync:             14275
11:16:42 New packages to download:     14275
11:16:43 1/14275 : 389-ds-base-1.3.5.10-20.el7_3.x86_64.rpm
11:16:43 2/14275 : 389-ds-base-1.3.4.0-26.el7_2.x86_64.rpm
11:16:43 3/14275 : 389-ds-base-1.3.5.10-11.el7.x86_64.rpm
11:16:43 4/14275 : 389-ds-base-1.3.3.1-16.el7_1.x86_64.rpm
[.. output ommited ..]
11:57:03 14275/14275 : zsh-5.0.2-14.el7_2.2.x86_64.rpm
Importing packages:     |##################################################| 100.0% 
13:10:05 Linking packages to channel.
13:10:19 Repo https://cdn.redhat.com/content/dist/rhel/server/7/7Server/x86_64/os has comps file 730c62cc7600c7518e4920f800cb9af6b73d75ba-comps.xml.
13:10:20 Repo https://cdn.redhat.com/content/dist/rhel/server/7/7Server/x86_64/os has 1885 errata.
13:10:50 Kickstartable tree not detected (no valid treeinfo file)
13:10:50 Repo URL: https://cdn.redhat.com/content/dist/rhel/server/7/7.3/x86_64/kickstart
13:10:55 Packages in repo:              4751
13:12:32 No new packages to sync.
13:12:32 Linking packages to channel.
13:12:44 Repo https://cdn.redhat.com/content/dist/rhel/server/7/7.3/x86_64/kickstart has comps file c542e4cf37dd210de68877b53f41d92dc7686c6e1b35ca4b1852f2e62fca2c72-comps-Server.x86_64.xml.gz.
13:12:44 Repo https://cdn.redhat.com/content/dist/rhel/server/7/7.3/x86_64/kickstart has 0 errata.
13:12:44 Added new kickstartable tree ks-rhel-x86_64-server-7-7.3. Downloading content...
13:12:44 Gathering all files in kickstart repository...
Downloading kickstarts: |##################################################| 100.0%
[.. output ommited ..]
13:24:53 Sync of channel completed in 2:08:33.
13:24:54 Total time: 2:08:33
[root@sat58 ~]# 

A subsequent run of cdn-sync without any parameters behaves like satellite-sync, its syncing previously synced channels.

You probably want to schedule a cronjob for daily syncing new content

[root@sat58b ~]# echo '0 1 * * * perl -le "sleep rand 9000" && /usr/bin/cdn-sync' >> /etc/cron.d/cdn-sync

The output of the sync actions are logged to /var/log/rhn/cdnsync.log

Clearing the cache

Remember rm -rf /var/cache/rhn/satsync/* when something went wrong? That’s gone :-). You just use cdn-sync –clear-cache.

cdn-sync --clear-cache

Upgrading from Satellite 5.7

I’ve not found the time yet to test the upgrade, I’ll let you know about my experience and thoughts in a few days.

Conclusion

After approximately 15 years, old school Redhat Satellite 5 will finally be replaced with Satellite 6 which is built on base of completely different technologies such as The Foreman, Pulp, Katello etc.

Satellite 5.8 is a very mature release no major bugs are known.

Satellite users are encouraged to discover Satellite 6 now, to be ready for the transition to be made in 2020.

Have fun 🙂