Does Satellite show you which boxes will require a reboot after patching?

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Good Morning,

I am new to Satellite and have a maintenance window coming up. I have 70 servers almost all of which have Errata or packages that queued up for installation. I am trying to figure out if there is a single view within Satellite that can tell me which packages/errata will require a reboot after installation.

Thanks

Responses

From the WebUI I haven't found a way, and I don't see in the API where you can search errata for the reboot_suggested flag, even though it is present for every errata

      "id": "1bf548b8-747d-447a-8955-021e65ea5f16",
      "title": "sysstat bug fix update",
      "errata_id": "RHBA-2017:2249",
      "issued": "2017-08-01",
      "updated": "2017-08-01",
      "severity": "None",
      "description": "The sysstat packages provide the sar and iostat commands. These commands enable system monitoring of disk, network, and other I/O activity.\n\nFor detailed information on changes in this release, see the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 Release Notes linked from the References section.\n\nUsers of sysstat are advised to upgrade to these updated packages.",
      "solution": "For details on how to apply this update, refer to:\n\nhttps://access.redhat.com/articles/11258",
      "summary": "An update for sysstat is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.",
      "reboot_suggested": false,
      "type": "bugfix",

I was just discussing this with another Satellite user at another financial institution. I dug around a little and found this commit https://github.com/Katello/katello/commit/eb22ed545f3ecf9bd617cb96440745bb9528f22f which supposedly adds reboot_suggested as a searchable value for erratum in the upstream. But I'm guessing this has not made its way down stream (so RFE to open)

In the interim, you might be able to do a hammer call such as this : hammer erratum list --errata-restrict-installable 1 --search "reboot_suggested=true"

Though I've had mine running for about five minutes and haven't gotten any results.

For the fun of it, I made the change in our lab satellite env, and added the one missing line from the commit, and I'm able to search reboot_suggested = true from the webUI Errata page.

So it looks like its a matter of this not making it into the current releases. I filed an RFE for it.

I believe there are two questions that usually come up here:

  • before application, how do I know which errata require a reboot?
  • after application, how do I know which systems, who've installed an errata which require a reboot, haven't yet been rebooted.

For the former, as Will mentioned, You can't easily search for the reboot_suggested keyword. You can grok this info via the API. I wrote showErrataReqReboot.py as an example of how to use the API to report this data. The upstream issued linked above is aligned to Katello 3.1 which will be in the next release of Satellite (we are expecting it to ship with Katello 3.4.x) However, if you need relief sooner than that, feel free to open a ticket.

For the latter, see BZ1392013, which is aligned to Satellite 6.3.0

Satellite now integrates with Tracer to determine which services need to be restarted, for RHEL 7 clients only. See Satellite 6.3 Feature Overview: Tracer.

However, Satellite doesn't seem to have a list of systems requiring reboots. I've written a script to query the API for this. https://github.com/benformosa/sat6-traces.

Oh sure we do. On the hosts page, using the search box, you can search for hosts by their tracer status.

Alternatively, you can do this with a hammer command, such as hammer host list --search "trace_status = reboot_needed"

Does this work only for RHEL7 clients, or can it be used for RHEL6 too?

Hi Rich do we need to install something on the RHN Satellite server for the command to work? hammer host list --search "trace_status = reboot_needed"

https://access.redhat.com/articles/3358611

Looks pretty straight forward from the Tech Preview Documentation in the release notes for Satellite 6.3
On the client yum install katello-host-tools-tracer

I tested this in our Satellite 6.3 environment and I believe it worked without any update to the Satellite Server itself.. Pretty handy

This command from above seems useful: hammer erratum list --errata-restrict-installable 1 --search "reboot_suggested=true"

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