Slashdot Log In
Red Hat Open-Sources RHN As "Spacewalk"
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Jun 20, 2008 11:41 AM
from the management-gets-cheaper dept.
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."
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Automatic Updates (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem you have in the enterprise is the IT mangers need to know what is being updated and talk to the appropriate application people so they can get approval to do the actual update. In the majority of cases you are going to find a vendor who is not willing to support a particular update so you end up with a political mess on your hands.
From the Redhat, Fedora
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
True story. It wasn't anyones fault, it was just a disastrous intersection of code bases. Also, Johnny Hughes of the CentOS team, and a regular slashdotter, was nothing short of amazing for email support. I think I heard back from him
Good Points (Score:3, Interesting)
At home, I'm a distro hopper
Caveats (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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 wil
GPLv2 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The "political statement" part and the "didn't want to be a part of it" are however conspiracy theories - or more likely a reflection of your own views, given your username - that seem to forget that RedHat welcomed the GPLv3 and contributed to the process:
We want to congratulate the Free Software Foundation, the Software Freedom Law Center, and the many companies and individuals, who have all worked so diligently, for their efforts in developing version 3 [redhat.com]
Will it support LDAP and Kerberos? (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
My experience with RHN Satellite (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.
Re:My experience with RHN Satellite (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Parent
Re:My experience with RHN Satellite (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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:My experience with RHN Satellite (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
We've been using it for a couple of years now, and I've even taken the class on it. Everyone's gripes here are quite true. I've got three gripes with it. One: the Monitoring module [redhat.com], uses an internal package RedHat bought called NOCPulse. I've got auditing running on our machine and I found that gogo.pl, a piece of NOCPulse, opens /etc/shadow in read/write mode hundreds of times a day. The kicker, is that it's non-obvious from the source code where or how it's doing this, or even why. We've threatened
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Net booting is only one aspect of provisioning. What about tracking (servers, virtual machines, assets, images, configs, etc)? Or adding hosts to DNS and DHCP configs? Or keeping machines synced after the initial install? Or password and user management?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
False. Satellite supports an external database as well. I suspect the lack of RHEL5 support is due to package incompatibilities.
RHN? Yum? (Score:2)
Why use RHN when yum works very well?
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Because YUM doesn't track assets such as activation keys (for RHEL Products) nor does YUM by itself allow you to install a package on multiple systems at the same time without some type of frontend (like Spacewalk for instance).
I realize this is slashdot, where no one RTFAs before spouting off with an uninformed troll such as yours, but damn, even just a cursory glance of the wiki at the provided link would have answered your question.
Kudos! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Oracle? Doh! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Landscape (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:In related news... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent