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Red Hat Open-Sources RHN As "Spacewalk"

Posted by kdawson on from the management-gets-cheaper dept.

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."

2 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. My experience with RHN Satellite by bwhaley · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
    1. Re:My experience with RHN Satellite by EvilAlphonso · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.