RHN Satellite 5.4 supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 clients and content, due to SHA256 feature work. Previous versions of Satellite do not provide support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 clients.

RHN Satellite 5.4 and RHN Proxy Server 5.4 are available for installation on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 only. For full details, including architecture combinations supported, refer to the Red Hat Network Satellite Installaton Guide.

RHN Satellite now supports adding and managing external 3rd-party content repositories. Users can currently add yum-based repositories to their Satellite via URL and sync package content to make it available to one or more channels. For more information about this feature, refer to the Red Hat Network Satellite Reference Guide.

RHN Satellite users can now find and remove duplicated system registrations using the Duplicate Profile feature. With this feature, users can reclaim entitlements for re-provisioned and/or re-registered systems, alleviating the problem of one system taking two or more entitlements. Enhancements are also made within kickstart provisioning to eliminate the creation of duplicates over re-provisioning events. For more information about this feature, refer to the Red Hat Network Satellite Reference Guide.

The Flex Guest feature allows Satellite users to entitle virtual guest systems using special floating entitlements, such that they do not consume regular entitlements. Previous RHN Satellite users can use this feature to convert virtual guests consuming regular entitlements over to Flex Guest entitlements. For more information about this feature, refer to the Red Hat Network Satellite Reference Guide.

Support for Oracle 11g has been added to RHN Satellite. Users may deploy Oracle 11g as a Stand-Alone Database. For more information on Database requirements for RHN Satellite, refer to the Red Hat Network Satellite Installaton Guide.

SHA256 support has been added to RHN Satellite, which allows users to serve and manage content (such as RPM files) that use SHA256 to calculate file checksum as well as package signature and verfication.

Package installation dates have been added to the RHN Satellite Web users interface. Users can now see the date and time a package was updated without checking the RHN Satellite system log files.

System links (symlink) support has been added to RHN Satellite configuration management. Users can add symlinks to configuration files and Satellite will manage and verify whether the symlinks are correctly deployed on the target system.

SELinux support has been added to RHN Satellite configuration management. Users can set SELinux context on configuration files within the RHN Satellite Web user interface, which eases deployment of Satellite-managed configuration files on an SELinux deployed client system.

Bug 631875 - SELinux modules that support Monitoring of RHN Satellite and RHN Proxy Server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 are available. Note that because this feature is a Technology Preview, it may not be functionally complete and is currently not supported for production use.

Bug 495973, 567178 - Within Satellite web user interface now includes the America/Regina and Pacific/Auckland time zones for selection.

Bug 556787 - The rhnsearchd and taskomaticd daemons are now confined by SELinux policies in Satellite 5.4

Bug 578292 - The spacewalk-report command-list utility now provides three new reports:

Bug 582772 - spacewalk-create-channel is a new command line utility to help automate channel cloning to specific Red Hat Enterprise Linux maintenance releases.

MultiOrg System migrations can now be performed via the Satellite Web user interface on a per-system basis. You may also continue to use the previously-released migrate-system-profile command line utility to perform the same task.

Bug 585965 - Incorrect Errata calculation/Update for multi-lib systems - WebUI package upgrade selection now works correctly for x86_64 systems.

Bug 531719 - Enable PXE just once by default - We now by default only perform a single installation when PXE Booting a system to (re-)provision it.

Bug 591899 - Cloning an already cloned channel doesn't clone all the errata - We now correctly track and clone errata cloned for cloned channels

Bug 494510 - Yum repodata generation performance improvements - After initial generation of yum repo data for channels. Subsequent yum generation is 50-70% faster to complete.

Due to architectural changes within the Taskomatic daemon for Satellite, the Task Engine Status page under the Admin tab is no longer available.

When upgrading to RHN Satellite 5.4, please upgrade the rhncfg-* packages on any client systems using configuration management. Older client tooling is not compatible with the system link (symlink) support added in this release.

There is a known issue with the rhncfg-manager tool when used for diff, download-channel and upload-channel functions. The rhncfg-manager tool fails to correctly track the SELinux context and can fail to report changes (diff) to context or reset the context of files managed within a Configuration Channel.

If you are installing RHN Satellite 5.4 with SELinux in enforcing mode, ensure that you have updated to newest selinux-policy-targeted package due to known incompatibilities with older (prior to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5) versions of the selinux-policy-targeted package.

The rhnpush process can timeout for extremely large rpms, even if the push did successfully finish.

Due to changes for SHA256 feature, old rhnpush clients are not compatible with RHN Satellite 5.4. When attempting to upload Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 compatible content, use the newest rhnpush to avoid generating errors.