Red Hat NETWORK SATELLITE 5.3.0 - RELEASE NOTES, NETWORK SATELLITE 5.3.0 Release Note

Red Hat Network

Satellite 5.3.0

Release Notes 530

Red Hat Network Satellite

Release Notes 530

Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3.0 Release Notes 530
Red Hat Network Satellite
Edition 5.3.0

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iii

1. Major Features 1

2. Major Corrections 3

A. Revision History 5

iv

Chapter 1.

1

Major Features

The following are the major features released as part of Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3.0.

• RHN Satellite includes a significant update to the Multiple Organizations feature, which allows
administrators to view, create, and manage multiple organizations across the Satellite.

• Trust relationships between organizations are now supported, allowing Satellite Administrators to

establish mutual connections between two or more organizations.

• Organizations within a trust can share their custom content channels with each other, provided

that the Organization Administrator or Channel Administrator gives access to the custom channel
in the channel sharing configuration.

• Organization Administrators can now migrate systems from one trusted organization to another.

The system configuration history (such as entitlements, software and configuration channels, and
virtual guest associations) are preserved. The destination organization can then configure the
system for their purposes.

For more information about multiple organizations feature, refer to the Red Hat Network Satellite
Reference Guide.

• RHN Satellite now supports automated system installation via the cobbler installation server.
Administrators can use Cobbler to store, manage, and automate several aspects of system
installation and provisioning, from package installation and channel subscription to DHCP and DNS
configuration. Administrators can also use the koan tool to re-provision existing systems and guests
in a virtualized system. For more information about using Cobbler and Koan, refer to the Red Hat
Network Satellite Reference Guide.

• RHN Satellite now features Inter-Satellite Sync support, which allows Satellite Administrators to
synchronize channel content from one master Satellite server to one or more slave Satellites,
regardless of location. For more information about using Inter-Satellite Sync, refer to the Red Hat
Network Satellite Installation Guide.

• Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3.0 now allows users to install RHN Satellite and RHN Proxy Server
server within a VMWare guest system, in addition to support for installation on Xen guests from
previous Red Hat Network Satellite releases.

• New and updated search features are now available in RHN Satellite 5.3.0, including:

• Improvements to the errata and system search are now available. Errata can now be queried

using a Free Form search that supports using field names to restrict results to certain keywords
such as package name, package description, filename, and more.

• Search results have been improved with fuzzy string support, which will display approximate

matches to find results that are spelled similarly to the queried term.

A Documentation Search feature has been added to the Satellite Help page. You can search all
of the RHN Satellite and RHN Proxy Server documentation, including the Reference Guide, the
Installation Guide for both Satellite and Proxy, the Release Notes, and more

For more information about using search, refer to the Red Hat Network Satellite Reference Guide.

Chapter 1. Major Features

2

• The RHN Satellite Application Programming Interface (API) has been expanded and now features
several new calls, including new calls for the multiple organizations feature, Cobbler installation
server, and system and errata search.

• RHN Proxy Server now supports command-line installation via the configure-proxy.sh
program, which allows administrators to install RHN Proxy Server through a series of interactive
prompts. For more information on using the command-line installation program, refer to the Red Hat
Network Proxy Installation Guide.

• RHN Satellite now supports multiple architectures within a single registered system that is running
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8.0 or later and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3.0 or later. RHN Satellite
now displays the architecture of installed or available packages when queried along with package
names; and users have a choice to install, update, or remove packages according to architecture.

• RHN Satellite and RHN Proxy Server now feature support for SELinux targeted policy in
enforcing or permissive on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3.0 or later. SELinux is a set of secure
software policies that implement mandatory access control to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other
operating systems. SELinux is activated by default on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and now users can
have SELinux in enforcing or permissive mode with the targeted policy during installation of
Proxy or Satellite.

Note

Installation on an SELinux system is only supported in Red Hat Enterprise Linux

5.3.0 or later, and is not supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.

• SELinux modules that support Monitoring of RHN Satellite and RHN Proxy Server on Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 5 are now available. Note that because this feature is a Technology Preview, it may
not be functionally complete and is currently not supported for production use.

For more information, refer to http://kbase.redhat.com and use the keyword "SELinux Monitoring".

• RHN Satellite now supports Solaris for UltraSPARC T1 (sun4v) and X86_64 processors.

Chapter 2.

3

Major Corrections

The following are the major bug fixes and workarounds released as part of RHN Satellite 5.3.0.

• File paths related to the Monitoring feature of RHN Satellite have been rewritten to conform to

the Linux Standards Base (LSB). Monitoring files that were once in the /opt directory have
been moved to /usr/bin/ for executable scripts, /var/log/ for log files, and /var/lib/ for
associated library files.

For example, to execute the script called monitor-queue, instead of typing /opt/

notification/scripts/monitor-queue you can now type monitor-queue or /usr/sbin/
monitor-queue at a shell prompt.

• rhn-proxy and rhn-satellite are no longer running services. All services related to RHN
Proxy Server and RHN Satellite functionality (httpd, jabberd, tomcat, Monitoring, Monitoring
Scout, and the database service) can be stopped, started, and restarted individually.

You can stop, start, or restart all Satellite services at once using the following command:

/usr/sbin/rhn-satellite {stop|start|restart}

You can stop, start, or restart Proxy using the following command:

/usr/sbin/rhn-proxy {stop|start|restart}

• The default Virtualization Type when creating a kickstart profile has been changed from none
(which is no longer an option) to Xen para-virtualized Guest. If you do not intend to creat a
kickstart profile for virtual guest, you should leave it at the default and it will not affect your profile.

• RHN Satellite no longer supports kickstart distributions located outside of the Satellite server. All
distributions must be synced and located on the Satellite server itself.

• The Nocpulse home directory has been moved from /home/nocpulse to /var/lib/nocpulse.
Nocpulse is now created as system account with uid of less than 500.

• An issue has been fixed where Monitoring would fail to run with an external database that had a
different name than the database instance name.

• Monitoring probes now work even when the SSH daemon has defined banner text.

• An issue has been fixed where repomd cache files were broken for custom channels on RHN Proxy
on RHEL 5 systems.

To resolve this issue, after reinstallation of Proxy, run the following command:

rm -f /var/spool/rhn-proxy/list/*

Chapter 2. Major Corrections

4

• Monitoring code has been refactored and all files from the /opt/ directory related to Monitoring
have been moved to their proper directories (/etc/nocpulse/, /var/lib/nocpulse/, /var/
log/nocpulse/, and /var/log/notification).

• Mail for the nocpulse user is now forwarded to root (as defined in the /usr/lib/
nocpulse/.forward file).

• Monitoring log files now include date and timestamps for every record.

• A new configuration option, enable_snapshots, has been added to the /etc/rhn/rhn.conf
file. This allows administrators to enable or disable capturing system snapshots. By default,
snapshots are enabled; to disable it, edit the enable_snapshots option to the following:

enable_snapshots=0

• RHN Satellite 5.3.0 now has the ability to purge system snapshots via the API.

• Subsystem script /etc/rc.d/init.d/osa-dispatcher now returns correct status.

• TNSping monitoring probe has been rewritten to work with Oracle Instant Client.

• When using Satellite with SELinux enabled, if /var/satellite/ is changed to an NFS mount
after the initial installation, you must run the following command:

/usr/sbin/setsebool -P spacewalk_nfs_mountpoint 1

5

Appendix A. Revision History

Revision History
Revision 1.0 Fri Feb 27 2009

6