Chapter 2. Requirements

These requirements must be met before installation. The Satellite itself must be of a version greater than or equal to the version of the Proxy that you are trying to install. For example, if you want to install RHN Proxy Server 5.1, the Satellite version should be 5.1 or later, and can not be 5.0 or lower.

2.1. Software Requirements

To perform an installation, the following software-related components must be available:
  • Base operating system — RHN Proxy Server is supported with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6. The operating system can be installed from disc, local ISO image, kickstart, or any of the methods supported by Red Hat.
    RHN Proxy Server can be installed on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6 in any virtualized environment supported by Red Hat, including Xen, KVM, and VMware.
    Note that for production deployments, we recommend that you deploy RHN Proxy Server as the sole application running on the underlying physical hardware to avoid contention issues. Also, be aware that functional support for virtualized environments does not always equal the performance of running on physical hardware, so you may need to carefully consider your virtualized environment of choice and any tuning guide lines recommended.

    Note

    Each purchased RHN Proxy product includes one supported instance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server. RHN Proxy must be installed onto a fresh installation of Enterprise Linux where RHN Proxy is the only application and service provided by the OS. Using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS included in RHN Proxy to run other daemons, applications, or services within your environment is not supported.
    Each version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux requires a certain package set to support RHN Proxy Server. Adding more packages can cause errors during installation. Therefore, Red Hat recommends obtaining the desired package set in the following ways:

    Note

    For kickstarting, specify the following package group: @Base
    For installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux via CD or ISO image, select the following package group: Minimal
  • An available RHN Proxy Server entitlement within your RHN Satellite Server account.
  • An available Provisioning entitlement within your RHN Satellite Server account (which should come packaged with your RHN Proxy Server entitlement).
  • Access to the Red Hat Network Tools channel for the installed version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This channel includes the spacewalk-proxy-installer package that contains the configure-proxy.sh installation program required to install RHN Proxy Server.
  • All rhncfg* packages installed on the Proxy (from the RHN Tools channel).
  • Either the rhns-certs-tools package installed on the Proxy (from the RHN Tools channel) for RHN Hosted users, or the secure sockets layer (SSL) CA certificate password used to generate the parent server certificate for RHN Satellite Server users.
  • Configuration of the system to accept remote commands and configuration management through Red Hat Network if using the deprecated Web UI installation method. Refer to Section 4.2, “RHN Proxy Server Installation Process” for instructions.