Satellite 6.2.8 is released

Satellite 6.2.8 has been released today as part of RHBA-2017:0447

Customers who have already upgraded to 6.2 should follow the instructions in the errata. Customers who are on 6.1.x should follow the upgrade instructions in the Installation Guide. Customers who have received hotfixes should verify the list below to ensure their hotfix is contained in the release before upgrading. Please reach out to the Satellite team in these cases.

A number of significant improvements are delivered in this release. A few of these are mentioned below:

Notification of Subscriptions which require virt-who.

On the Subscriptions page in the UI, Satellite now prominently displays if a subscription requires virt-who.

Click to enlarge

Additionally, when importing a subscription manifest that contains subscriptions that require virt-who, the user is directed to the Customer Portal for guidance & documentation regarding virt-who configuration. BZ139544

Applying Custom Configuration via the installer

Satellite 6.2.8 now allows the administrator to customize files that the installer manages. Previously, if installer managed files such as /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf was manually modified, these changes were reverted on the next installer run. With Satellite 6.2.8, a means to customize these files (and maintain their changes) is provided. Read more in Satellite 6.2 Feature Overview: Applying Custom Configuration via the installer.

Red Hat Insights Weekly Summary Emails

The feature is designed to send emails to local users of Insights in
Satellite. A single summary email will be sent every week for each
organization per user when all of the following conditions are met:

• Insights is enabled in the organization
• At least one host is subscribed to Insights in the organization
• The user has subscribed to Insights notifications (In UI, top right
  hand corner, select -> My Account ->Email Notifications ->
  (Select "subscribe" for "Insights Notifications" )
• Your Satellite is correctly configured to send emails

Remote Execution can be configured to prefer FQDN versus IP

In many deployments of software clusters, such as Pacemaker, HP Serviceguard, and Oracle's RAC, virtual IP addresses are shared between multiple physical systems. Previously, Remote Execution used the host's IP address to connect to the system. This was troublesome in clustered deployments as some of the IP addresses are shared and 'float' between physical systems. This had the net effect that Remote Execution jobs could be scheduled on a undesired host in the cluster.

With Satellite 6.2.8, Remote Execution now uses the Fully Qualified Domain Name as the default method to connect to hosts. Host can be configured to use the previously method by setting the remote_execution_connect_by_ip parameter to true, globally, or at the host/hostgroup level. BZ1402432

Dashboard & Widget improvements

A number of improvements to the dashboard were delivered in 6.2.8, including, but not limited to:

• Performance improvements to the latest events dashboard Widget
• Dashboard search previously failed with foreman_discovery installed. This has been resolved.
• In many cases, the dashboard failed if the user had a filtered role. This has been resolved
• Dashboard widget data is now lazily loaded.

Upgrade Notes

In addition, customers who upgraded directly from 6.1 to 6.2.7 may be seeing an issue with their capsules. Please see this KCS before upgrading.

Full list of fixes & enhancements in 6.2.8 are:

• Dashboard performance improvements from 6.3 have been backported to 6.2.z. (BZ#1413361, BZ#1232877)
• Several upgrade issues have been addressed. (BZ#1420626, BZ#1419511, BZ#1418747, BZ#1387776, BZ#1404348)
• Multiple performance issues have been addressed in the UI and Hammer. (BZ#1399765, BZ#1393611, BZ#1395777, BZ#1383378)
• Provisioning on Atomic Host through a proxy has been fixed. (BZ#1406506, BZ#1366134)
• Red Hat Insights will now send emails to Satellite users (BZ#1403979)
• Several issues in Remote Execution have been addressed (BZ#1402432, BZ#1392948, BZ#1388696, BZ#1378915)
• The installer has been improved to support arbitrary configuration options. (BZ#1305782)
• Fixes for RHV 4.0 and VMware compute profiles are included (BZ#1393928, BZ#1394290)
• Several broken Hammer commands have been fixed (BZ#1420673, BZ#1023127, BZ#1372372)
• Multiple bugs around Content Management have been addressed (BZ#1329689, BZ#1414149, BZ#1388618, BZ#1388173, BZ#1385800, BZ#1371406, BZ#1291960, BZ#1405085, BZ#1355752, BZ#1346816)
• Several bugs around provisioning have been addressed (BZ#1403393, BZ#1412951, BZ#1406362, BZ#1386334, BZ#1335604)
• The katello-backup tool now correctly handles re-using the same target directory (BZ#1377636)
• Navigating to the products page from certain other pages would result in an error. This has been resolved. (BZ#1411800)
• Users can now search the audit log by type (BZ#1406175)
• Registration failures due to unexpected hardware facts have been addressed (BZ#1363749, BZ#1405614)
• Promotion emails were not being sent, and should now work (BZ#1369817)
• The subscription page will now make it apparent that the user should set up virt-who (BZ#1393544)