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."

Comments

My experience with RHN Satellite

[bwhaley]

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.

Re:My experience with RHN Satellite

[EvilAlphonso]

After 4 years of satellite management, I can say the following:

The configuration channels suck so much in practice that we are developing our own internal solution to replace it.

The RHEL5 support is a mystery to me as well, it might be related to the issues encountered running the Sat inside a xen guest. I need to check with my TAM, but the last official message I had was "not supported".

I'm in the process of migrating from Sat 5.0 to Sat 5.1, to take advantage of the sub-org delegation. That was one of the biggest pains in the previous versions as my customer is split into 20-ish independent entities and I get to manage the satellite that maintains them all. After the migration, I fully intend to just maintain the channel staging, the common custom packages and the kickstart templates. I will delegate the actual kickstart part to the sysadmins without having to give them complete control over all the machines of the site.

I am also very excited by the new RHN API, maybe I will finally be able to fully automate the errata management with automated regression testing for our supported use cases. As it stands now, the errata staging consumes most of my work week...

Hint: OSAD is used to push updates or commands to the client from the satellite. The clients subscribe to a jabber channel and do what the satellite tells them to. Chances are the old hostname is still in the jabber configuration file... happened to me during the Sat5 upgrade.

Re:My experience with RHN Satellite

[nologin]

Hmm, I've worked with RHN satellite quite a bit, and it does have some nice features. My biggest complaint about it is that the interface isn't intuitive as it should be; if you need to find things, some of them are hidden well enough so you have to memorize stuff...

But to answer your question about OSAD, the RHN satellite server uses this to automatically push instructions to its clients. Without OSAD, the only way that the client verifies that it has tasks to do is through a script called rhn-check. That runs periodically via crontab on the managed system; it initiates a connection to the satellite server and executes any tasks that are listed in its scheduled tasks. If you want to change how often the system checks in with the satellite server, just change the timing on rhn-check in the crontab.

The OSAD service is a tool that allows you to automatically push changes from the satellite server to the managed systems immediately. You run the osad service on the managed system and the osa-dispatcher service on the satellite server and once you use the webUI on the satellite server to do something (like upgrade a package for example), the managed system will update immediately, rather than wait for the next check in (rhn-check) to run on the managed system. A gross simplification of what OSAD does is that it performs actions in real time, rather than on a regular scheduled check-in basis.

Re:Caveats

[mattmarlowe]

Also from the website:

    Can I use Spacewalk to sync my entitlements for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other Red Hat software products?

    No. At this time, in order to be able to connect to rhn.redhat.com and satellite-sync Red Hat software content, you will need the Satellite product with an active Satellite certificate.

    Now that Spacewalk is available, does this affect Satellite pricing?

    Basing the Satellite product on a free & open source project will not affect the product's pricing. However, we are currently considering alternative ways of packaging the product based on studies we have done on the usage of the product as well as feedback from our valued customers.
    These considerations are unrelated to the product becoming free & open source, though. If you have feedback on this please contact your Red Hat sales representative or if applicable your Technical Account Manager.

If you look at the table/figures on the FAQ page, you'll also see that RedHat is discouraging use of spacewalk for RHEL.

Furthermore, if you look at the roadmap, you'll see support for various Fedora and CentOS versions listed but nothing for RHEL.