Upgrading RHN Satellite from 5.3 to 5.4, experiences and hints

As I wrote in my previous post I’ll let you know about my experiences. The most important message is: It is easy to upgrade your Satellite from 5.3 to 5.4, if you have an eye on certain things. Everyone that plans to use RHEL6 and manage it with a Satellite server needs this upgrade, due to the fact that RHEL6 comes with SHA-256 checksums on its RPM packages. Who needs this upgrade? Any company that plans to use RHEL6 which ….Read More

RHN Satellite 5.4, first analysis

First of all: Where is the Red Hat Press release? Nada, nothing, nichts (yet)…. History As I wrote in my previous post, I’ll keep you posted with my latest findings. In another post, I was speculating about the upstream version. Now, Sat540 seems to be based on Spacewalk 1.2 which is not yet released. I was quite puzzled about that fact. Usually upstream (Fedora) projects are ahead of its commercial counterparts, this time it seems to be the other way ….Read More

Spacewalk is moving further to PostgreSQL support

The upstream of RHN Satellite – Spacewalk – is moving further to database indepedancy, with the scope of PostgreSQL compatiblity. How I come to this conclusion? Read the git commit logs. At FUDCon 2010 in Zurich I was attending Miroslav’s talk. He was complaining that nobody gives the PostgreSQL-version a try. He is right, on one hand everybody expects PostgreSQL support ASAP, on the other hand nobody takes care about the PostgreSQL setup, and nobody helps neither with the development ….Read More

Rumours about RHEL6 GA end of October 2010

The latest unofficial rumors about the release date of RHEL6 are pointing to end of October 2010. This is a bit more precise than the official statement “later this year“. There are multiple sources of this rumors, so it can be considered truthful but still not as a fact. Hopefully RHN Satellite 5.4 will be released end of September to prepare the infrastructure to be able to manage RHEL6. Have fun!

RHN Satellite 5.4 release in sight

When analyzing recent Bugzilla-reports and mailing list posts, we can expect a RHN Satellite release quite soon. Why? The main reason for this is the lack of SHA256 support in sat530. Since RHEL6 packages having SHA256 checksums, the release of Satellite 5.4 is a prerequisite for releasing RHEL6. As always there will also be a large load of bugfixes included. Expected new features yum repository syncronising Support for SHA256 checksums Maybe support for SHA384 checksums Support for Oracle 11g databases ….Read More

RHN Inter-Satellite-Sync is kind of tricky and picky

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

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