Spacewalk 1.2 released -> PostgreSQL Support quite ready -> First analysis

Today, Spacewalk – the upstream project of the RHN satellite – released version 1.2. One of the promises the developers made was better support of PostgreSQL. It seems that lot of stuff is now working. As I promised, I’m going to examine whats working and whats not. I’ll file every single bug I’ll find, please do the same in a polite manner. First impression Installation and first sync of yum channels works like PostgreSQL support was there from the first ….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

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

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

Managing CentOS with Spacewalk

Red Hat RHN Satellite In 2003 Red Hat released its RHN Satellite server as a closed source management tool for RHEL and only for RHEL (okay, a legacy support for managing Solaris is available). The satellite is very useful tool for managing systems. Unfortunately it has a quite expensive price tag on it. According to the Red Hats RHN FAQ the bill is USD 13,500/year. Additionally to the RHN satellite subscription fee you need at least a subscription for the ….Read More