Upgrading RHN Satellite 5.6 to 5.7

This post guides you trough the upgrade procedure for a Satellite 5.6 using the embedded database on RHEL6-x86_64. Further it guides you to setup of Kerberos authentication of Satellite users with IPA. Recently Redhat released Satellite Server 5.7. Despite Satellite 5.x will be outphased in the next few years, there are plenty of new features. The most significant new features are: Upgraded PostgreSQL to 9.2 Authentication via IPA/SSSD/Kerberos IPMI support Renewed WebUI Readonly API users And finally… drum roll…. formal ….Read More

Why journalctl is cool and syslog will survive for another decade

There was a recent discussion going on if Fedora 20 should drop rsyslog and just using systemd journal. A lot of people are afraid of systemd and its journal, this a pity. Well, there are pros and cons about this kind of logging. For System administrators daily use, journalctl is a powerful tool simplifying the hunt for log file entries. On the other hand, there are AFAIK no monitoring tools (yet) that can work with journalctl. Those first need to ….Read More

Creating a PHP application on Openshift

What is OpenShift? It is a cloud, it is from Red Hat. More precisely: A PaaS (Platform As A Service). It is available since quite some time now and I finally found some time to test it. Conclusion: It is very simple to use. This will guide you how to create a PHP application which just prints “this is a test”. More to come in future postings. The following steps are needed: Create an account Installing the CLI and setting ….Read More

RHEV 3.1 – an overview about the new features

Recently Red Hat announced the public availability of RHEV 3.1. Finally, no more Windows needed for the whole software stack 🙂 In 3.0, the new webadmin interface was already inncluded, as a tech preview and had its problems. Now with 3.1 its working great and looks neat. In contrary to 3.0, it is now listening on the standard ports 80 and 443. This will probably help users in organizations with strict proxy policies and setting. So what else is new? ….Read More

How to recover from a lost Kerberos password for admin

Ever lost your password for the admin principle on your Linux Kerberos server? It is quite easy to recover by just setting a new one. You just need to log in to your KDC and proceed as follows: [root@ipa1 ~]# kadmin.local Authenticating as principal admin/admin@EXAMPLE.COM with password. kadmin.local: change_password admin@EXAMPLE.COM Enter password for principal “admin@EXAMPLE.COM”: Re-enter password for principal “admin@EXAMPLE.COM”: Password for “admin@EXAMPLE.COM” changed. kadmin.local: q [root@ipa1 ~]# Now enter kinit to get a Kerberos ticket. Have fun 🙂

Migrating from CentOS6 to RHEL6

There are different tutorial on the net how to migrate from RHEL to CentOS but almost no information about the other way round. It is quite simple and at the end of the day you have only Red Hat Packages installed. you need to copy the following packages from a Red Hat medium and install them: yum localinstall \ rhn-check-1.0.0-87.el6.noarch.rpm \ rhn-client-tools-1.0.0-87.el6.noarch.rpm \ rhnlib-2.5.22-12.el6.noarch.rpm \ rhnsd-4.9.3-2.el6.x86_64.rpm \ rhn-setup-1.0.0-87.el6.noarch.rpm \ yum-3.2.29-30.el6.noarch.rpm \ yum-metadata-parser-1.1.2-16.el6.x86_64.rpm \ yum-rhn-plugin-0.9.1-40.el6.noarch.rpm \ yum-utils-1.1.30-14.el6.noarch.rpm \ sos-2.2-29.el6.noarch.rpm \ Then ….Read More

How to get a RTL2832U based DVB-T stick working on Fedora 17

This week I bought a no-name DVB-T stick with the risk to not getting it working with Linux. The device contains a RTL2832u chip which seems to be quite common according to this list. The price tag was just €14, so I was taking the risk. First experiments shown that there is no chance to get it running on Fedora 17. After digging deeper I figured out that someone wrote a driver and published it on github. Later on, I ….Read More

Identity Management with IPA Part II – Kerberized NFS service

In part one I was writing how to set up an IPA server for basic user authentication. One reason NFSv4 is not that widespreaded yet, is it needs Kerberos for proper operation. Of course this is now much easier thanks to IPA. Goal for the part of the guide Configure IPA to serve the NFS principle Configure NFS to use IPA Configure some IPA clients to use Kerberos for the NFS service Requirements A runing IPA service like discussed in ….Read More