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Red Hat Open-Sources RHN As "Spacewalk"
deadearth writes "At their annual summit, Red Hat announced they are open-sourcing the Red Hat Network Satellite product, calling it Spacewalk. This will be the new upstream for the Satellite system management solution. Here is the Wiki."
It's about time! Now every kind of GPLed software, from operating systems to yet another version of colorizing "ls" can provide a nifty "automatic updates" feature without too much extra work on the part of the developers.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
Michael Jackson is suing Red Hat for trademark infringement, stating that the name 'Spacewalk' is just too similar to his trademark, 'Moonwalk'. ;)
My blog
Note that their blog entry states that they still expect all real redhat customers to continue purchasing the satellite service from RedHat rather than using this newly released software which is targeted for Fedora primarily with some support for centos. That's a little painful as I know several small businesses that pay for direct redhat updates/support and could use a local satellite install, but just can't afford the pricing and must continue to deal with the clunky/slow rhn web interface.
Interesting that the chose GPLv2 over the GPLv3. Does anyone have a educated guess to why?
Does it support LDAP and Kerberos? I used LDAP and Kerberos to replicate my updates using urpmi on Mandriva to keep all my updates syncronized on all my boxen for Application development. Kerberos is a must.
I'm currently working towards on RHCA, which requires a series of 5 exams, one of which covers "systems management." In the Red Hat world, this means RHN Satellite, Xen, and a few other misc tricks of the trade (packaging RPMs, RHN proxy, etc). The rub is that I'm trying to do this without taking the courses associated with each exam. This is a huge challenge since there is very little official material to study from. I'm currently signed up for EX401, the systems management text, next week.
I obtained an evaluation satellite license (they quoted around $13k/year as a retail cost) and a bunch of management, provisioning, and virtualization entitlements. I only have the course outline and the exam "prep guide", which is really just 20 or so bullets on what you need to know. I've done all my studying using Red Hat's Satellite documentation and the varoius Xen materials that are publicly available.
Satellite is a really useful technology for large enterprises with a bunch of Red Hat/CentOS/Fedora servers. It's exactly like the rhn.redhat.com interface. You can create kickstart profiles, provision new systems, manage Xen guests, run system commands, deploy configuration files (centralized syslog.conf, anyone? common /etc/motd? hosts.allow/.deny? very useful.), run commands on a lot of hosts at once, and carefully control patches.
I've got some beef with it. First, it's currently supported only on RHEL 4, not 5. RHEL5 has been out for about 15 months - what gives? Getting it set up and configured correctly has been very finicky. I still don't understand all the behind-the-scenes services. The jabber service that runs OSAD is a huge mystery to me. And God save you if you try to change your hostname - getting that SSL cert to match again has been a nightmare.
Some of this is certainly my own lack of knowledge. There's a useful, active mailing list that I see the developers participate in. I'm sure support is excellent as well. I've been mostly impressed with the documentation, but I don't need to see screenshots of every piece of the web interface. Tell me WTF that jabber process does! How can I get OSAD working properly? Plus, the docs can be pretty spread out and tough to find. I wasn't even aware of the mailing list until I read the README that's buried in the Satellite ISO.
All-in-all, a cool product, but perhaps not useful for organizations with 50 servers or so.
"I either want less corruption, or more chance
to participate in it." -- Ashleigh Brilliant
Why use RHN when yum works very well?
I used to be a red hat satellite administrator. There were quite a few bugs in the system that prevented me from doing the things with the network that I would have liked (centralized configuration file management, custom package deployment issues). It took Red Hat about a year and a half to solve each of the bugs, from the time I submitted them to the bug tracker to the time that a patch came out. I'm somewhat competent with Java, and do believe that I could have fixed the problems myself. I was beginning to get a bit frustrated with Red Hat due to the little bugs that cropped up in the server, and the slowness to respond. I understand that software development and testing cycles are tough, but I kind of felt like, for the money (about $15k per year), a quicker fix was in order.
I also recognize that it's a tough decision for them to open source this thing which raises a lot of money for them. No doubt this will spawn some real service competition for Red Hat, as other companies will able to easily implement their own RedHat-derived operating system complete with a centralized management system. It does fix my "using open source software to sell a closed source service" gripe. It's definitely a brave move, so kudos to them.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
Too bad it requires Oracle. Im already jumping from RHEL to CentOS to cut operations costs given my broke higher-ed shop. Hopefully the project's codebase will mature to allow for a db backend which doesnt require me to pump a lot of cash I dont have to Papa Ellison in Redwood City.
From reading https://fedorahosted.org/spacewalk/wiki/SpacewalkFaq it sounds like they have plans on making it not so oracle-centric.
This is great. First the patent protection paid for out of their pockets, now this.
Have a squat over at the hobo house.
I wonder if this will push Canonical to release a version of Landscape, their equivalent service for Ubuntu, as free software. Currently Landscape is hosted by Canonical and costs $150 per node.
Actually, I pushed for Slack at work, but it made my (MSCE trained) boss nervous; I had to give something up as compromise for them allowing me to run Linux... CentOS being RHEL was enough leverage to get it through. Ironically, I prototyped the Samba server using Slack because all I could get together, hardware wise, to mock something up was an old EMachine 600 MHz clunker with a 20Gb 5.25" Quantum Fireball drive. Slack is the only thing (other than BSD) that would run on it.
At home, I'm a distro hopper on the desktop; Fedora-9 now, Sabayon a few months ago. But both my servers are Slackware (well, BlueWhite64 on the 64 bit side). I don't mind the package management, I compile and roll my own packages that I keep in a svn repo. I've even packaged my own PAM because it makes my life easier. On the desktop though, it's just too much work. But when I want a stable, rock solid, lean-and-mean-compiles-it-all-machine, it's Slackware all the way.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
To those in the know, RHN was originally NocPulse a Silicon Valley startup bought by Redhat. That was based on NetSaint, an open source project. So, now they are open sourcing part of a project that was based on an open source project!!
You do understand that anyone can download, install and use that version of Oracle free of charge, right? Oracle XE, aka *Express Edition*.
Verbification weirds the language.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!