Upgrading RHN Satellite 5.5 to 5.6

Redhat released version 5.6 of the Redhat Satellite. Time to have a closer look to it and how to upgrade from version 5.5. New features Finally PostgreSQL support is mature enough for Enterprise usage. No need of a closed source data base anymore. This also brings a lot of new capabilities such as online backups which before was only available using an external Oracle Database which needs the availability of a DBA. PostgreSQL also brings some performance benefits over the ….Read More

Intercepting proxies and spacewalk-repo-sync

More and more companies are using intercepting proxies to scan for malware. Those malware scanners can be problematic due to added latency. If you using spacewalk-repo-sync to synchronize external yum repositories to your custom software channels and experience the famous message [Errno 256] No more mirrors to try in your log files, then you need to configure spacewalk-repo-sync. Unfortunately the documentation for that is a bit hidden in the man page. You need to create a directory and create a ….Read More

Automated disk partitioning on virtual machines with Cobbler

The default Cobbler Snippets just do simple auto partitioning. For a more sophisticated partition layout you need to know what kind of VM you are going to install. KVMs and RHEVs device name is /dev/vda, Xen uses /dev/xvda and ESX /dev/sda. Luckily this can be figured out automatically, those different virtualization vendors are using its own MAC prefixes. So we can add two nice small Cobbler snippets to do the job. In this example, I call them hw-detect and partitioning. ….Read More

Cross distribution system management with Spacewalk

In a perfect world, all systems in a data centre are running the same Linux operating system, a homogeneous system landscape. In real life things are working differently. Windows systems are out of focus in this post, lets concentrate on Linux systems. Most companies with a large Linux base are either RHEL shops or using SLES. A lot of RHEL users have some SLES systems running and so are SLES users running some RHEL systems. Some companies have additional systems ….Read More

SUSE Manager based on Fedora Spacewalk

SUSE announced the availability of SUSE manager. Having a closer look to it, one recognizes it is based on Fedora Spacewalk. It is a clone of the Red Hat Satellite. A few weeks ago I was puzzled to see a post on the spacewalk-devel mailing list. SUSE was contributing some code. What the heck? Now it is clear, they are using Spacewalk as there source for its own product. Spacewalk is no longer just the upstream of RHN Satellite, but ….Read More

Some impressive figures about Spacewalk and my two cents

Today, I saw a interessing post on the spacewalk-devel mailing list. Lines of code Spacewalk has 2,908,841 lines of code, created in estimated 843 person years. This means 843 developers are needed to rewrite Spacewalk from scratch in one year! That’s amazing. Number of bugs fixed As stated in the post, the Spacewalk-team fixed 1012 bugs in the year 2010. Some 1061 bugs are still due to be solved, the Spacewalk-team will not running out of work in 2011. See ….Read More

Important RHN Satellite 5.4 bugs has been fixed

Red Hat recently released some bugfixes for the RHN-Satellite version 5.4. They needed approx. one month to develop a fix for those serious bugs. If you upgraded to sat540 before those bugsfixes have been released you will have a crippled database. The errata provides a way how to fix it. It needs some time, but it works perfectly. For “my” satellites it was taking about 48h for both satellites, about 12h for the master and 36h for the slave satellite. ….Read More

Pulp, what is it about it?

Thanks to Máirín’s posting I got aware of the Pulp project. What is it? I had a brief look at it, it is a Red Hat sponsored project with a similar functionality like Spacewalk and RHN Satellite. This brings me to the question: Is Pulp is intended to be a replacement of Spacewalk? It can make sense, it is written in Python as Cobbler is. Cobbler and Spacewalk are not really playing nice together. Spacewalk used Java, Perl and Python. ….Read More