Managing Linux systems with Spacewalk

Moon Landing

Article from ADMIN 01/2010

By Thorsten Scherf

As your network grows, managing Linux systems manually becomes time consuming and impractical. Enter Spacewalk: an open source tool that takes the footwork out of network management.

Spacewalk [1] is the open source derivative of the popular Red Hat Network Satellite Server. Red Hat published the source code for the server in the summer of 2008, and the community has now released version 1.0. The application's core tasks include RPM package software provisioning, managing configuration files, and kickstart trees, thus supporting the installation of bare-metal systems.

The approach that Spacewalk uses is quite simple: Before a system can access Spacewalk's resources, it first has to register with the server. Registration can be based either on a username/password combination or an activation key that is pregenerated by the Spacewalk server. After registration, the system appears in the server's web GUI.

If the server has more resources, you can assign them to the system at this point. Resources include software packages or configuration files that are normally organized in channels. A system always has exactly one base channel with optional subchannels. The base channel contains the RPM-based operating system, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, or CentOS. The subchannels contain additional software packages that are independent of the operating system, such as the Red Hat Cluster Suite or the 389 Directory Server.

Spacewalk can clone existing channels and create new channels from scratch. This feature gives you full control of the software stack that you provide via Spacewalk. Configuration channels help you distribute the configuration files for the software packages. Spacewalk also keeps older versions of the files to let you roll back to a previous version at any time if the need arises.

The software packages or configuration files can be installed either via the target system or centrally in the Spacewalk web front end. To avoid spending too much time on the installation of a large number of systems, you can assign

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