Slashdot Mirror
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."
This is part of the Red Hat enterprise experience, which in my humble opinion is not that great of an experience. I have used the RHN in the past, and I have been completely underwhelmed by the outdated up2date style gui's (which tend to freeze) and lack of really comprehensive command line support.
On top of that, your not really getting what you pay for over all. Sure, in corporate world you have a blame line and someone to go back to at least as far as distribution and configuration goes, but RHN is not "far superior" to current 'apt' and 'yum' type solutions that are available to the rest of the "free world". Any given day, I would trade off RHN interface for package management for those managers available on a (brace yourself) Ubuntu desktop.
Also, if your concerned about the "security' aspect of updating your enteprise from a public source (which is ridiculous in this day and age, just keep off the cutting edge and your fine) you can always create your own "yum" and "apt" repositories for a fraction of the price (price only implies hardware, bandwidth, and maintenance) of RHN.
On a "btw" I have never been in an environment where I needed to run the "same command" at exactly the "same time" on a variety of different servers. Of course... nothing says lovin like writing a perl script that has a "central server with distributed SSH key" that can "fork" processes off to the background and do a routine on multiple boxes for sans fee....
So why buy RHN again?
20th century Marxism is not progress...
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.