If you try to establish an ISS (Inter Satellite Sync) between two RHN Satellites, do not fully trust the documentation. A slave Satellite must be named by a hostname (IP is not enough) and must have an A and a PTR DNS record or have an /etc/hosts entry. Check it before restarting the satellite by issuing rhn-satellite restart. The check is simply done by entering gethostip rhn.example.com and getent hosts <IP-address> on the commandline. When Quoting the documentaion at Red ….Read More
Apache HTTP server and its further development
The Apache httpd is one of the most stable software pieces which is still in use. The latest huge step forward was with the release of 2.0. Quo vadis Apache httpd? The most current release is 2.2.15. During the 2.2.x release cycle, there have basically been only bug-fix releases (Okay, response header rewrite starting on 2.2.9 is a nice feature). This brings me to the question: What is going on with 2.4? The answer is quite simple: As you can ….Read More
Spacewalk 1.0 released
Spacewalk 1.0 has been released Spacewalk is the upstream project for Red Hat’s RHN Satellite software, one of the best systems management software available for Linux Systems. In the past few weeks one could see a lot of git commits on the source repository of spacewalk. There is no changelog available yet. The road map mentioned compatibility with Apache Tomcat 6.0.x to be able to install spacewalk on Fedora12 and RHEL6. There should have also been several enhancements in the ….Read More
Writing trigger scripts for cobbler does not work at the moment
At the moment, shell scripts as triggers wont work with cobbler. This is due to a bug. Unfortunately the developers wont fix it in the next few weeks or even months. Triggers are a very welcome and powerful method to automate things before, during after installation of a system. At the moment it only works with python scripts. Since not every sysadmin knows python, but everyone knows to write bash scripts, this is a major drawback. Cobbler is included in ….Read More
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS released
End of April 2010, Ubuntu 10.04 was released. As always it is based on Debian’s Testing-Release. Canonical “stabilizes” the testing tree of Debian and adds its own look. This time, Ubuntu radically changed its look. From my point of view it looks ugly, very ugly. Strange colors, low contrasts in menus, orange icons in Nautilus… window buttons on the left side… At the end of the day an usability-horror. Under the hood Ubuntu is a very stable distribution with recent ….Read More
RHEL6 as a web server
New software versions Today I’m writing about the changes and benefits of RHEL6 as a web server compared to RHEL5. Red Hat is well known for its stable API and ABI over the life-cycle of a major release. For some usage types this is a major problem. Sticking to old version of PHP, MySQL, Tomcat you-name-it-piece-of-software is problematic since web applications are rapidly changing its requirements. Instead of PHP 5.1.6, RHEL6 ships almost up-to-date PHP 5.3.1. Which is good, since ….Read More
A brief test of RHEL 6 Beta 1
As promised yesterday, I publish the results of a brief test of RHEL6 Beta 1 and the most important findings. It is my point of view as a system guys daily business. If not stated, this overview is based on a default installation with no customization. General There are new package groups such as “Minimal” with 228 Packages and “Basic Server” with 523 Packages. “Basic Server” is the default installation, which means the default click trough installation compared to RHEL5 ….Read More
Lets celebrate 25 years of DNS
Today, we can celebrate 25 years of DNS. Can we really celebrate? Is the age of /etc/hosts really over? No, /etc/hosts will last for ever. Why? DNS can only be filtered across orgs with problems There are sill some /etc/hosts freaks not retired yet From my point of view, the DNS is one of the most reliable systems, it is redundant and thus high-available by design. Thanks! Thanks to all those people that designed and operated DNS until today and in ….Read More