Chapter 5. Major Corrections

The Red Hat Satellite Proxy did not work properly if separated from a parent by a slow enough network. Consequently, users who attempted to download large repodata files and RPMs experienced timeouts. This update changes both Red Hat Satellite Proxy and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Satellite Client to obey a configured timeout value for connections.

For the Red Hat Satellite Proxy server, the config option to set is proxy.timeout within file /etc/rhn/rhn.conf

For the Red Hat Enterprise Linux clients, the config option to set is timeout within file /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/rhnplugin.conf

Previously, Satellite disabled deferred_segment_creation from external Oracle databases. Satellite now allows external Oracle databases with the deferred_segment_creation feature enabled to be installed.

The spacewalk-report tool now comes with a new option --where-<column-id>. This option supports wildcard string matching useful for searching through the spacewalk-report contents. Wildcards are defined by the SQL standard of the Red Hat Satellite's database backend.

A Web UI subtab and API have been created in Satellite to allow Satellite administrators to view physical systems only, excluding virtual systems. This enhancement allows administrators to sort out physical machines from virtual ones, especially in large scale deployments where the list is very long. This is useful when planning firmware updates that can only be applied on physical hardware only.

Satellite 5.6 now logs Satellite user events. This enhancement tracks what users have done in the Satellite at what particular time.

Database changes from predefined tables are logged by the Satellite auditing feature. In time, the logging data could potentially grow too big and take up excessive disk space in the Satellite database. A new script enables Satellite to purge the audit-log tables on a user set date.

In an Inter-Satellite Synchronization (ISS) between a master and slave, satellite-sync removed any preset privacy attributes. This was being caused by the channel_access DB column, which was not being exported in the channel dumps. Non-identical OrgIDs between one Satellite to the other, which resulted in the database resetting the value to the default attribute ("private").

With Satellite 5.6 the ISS configuration has changed from the manual editing of rhn.conf to using the Web UI pages. The addition of the ability to map organizations from one Satellite to another preserves the organization and channel trust relationships as the content is exported. Preset privacy attributes are preserved during the export.

There was a discrepancy in date and time values when upgrading from 5.5 to 5.6. This discrepancy is due to database schema changes from 5.5 to 5.6. To fix this issue, the spacewalk-report tool now defaults all dates and time values to the UTC timezone to preserve date and time value consistency on database backend reports. Use the --timezone option to set custom time zones to take into account the scope of the report. The list of timezones is specified by Red Hat Satellite's database backend SQL standard.

Satellite 5.6 displayed all client system packages and provided links to all packages, even those not available on the Satellite. Clicking on unavailable packages on the Satellite would produce permission errors. Satellite 5.6 has provided a fix to the issue by rendering all packages not available on the Satellite as non-clickable.

The script previously known as check-oracle-space-usage.sh has been renamed to check-database-space-usage.sh. This scripts runs nightly as a standard cron job for Satellite.

The following changes have been made to the database in Satellite 5.6:
 - The default database directory has changed from /rhnsat/ to /var/lib/pgsql/
 - The datafiles will now extend/increase automatically and no longer require the manual administration to add additional data files for the database.
 - The extend option is no longer available for db-control.
 - The system administrator will need to monitor and administer to disk space allocation for the /var/lib/pgsql/ directory/partition.
 - The nightly cron-job check-oracle-space-usage, previously used to monitor the space allocation for Embedded Oracle, is now used to monitor the overall free space allocated to the partition where the /var/lib/pgsql/ resides.

The --keep-rpms option has been added to the command satellite-sync. When a Satellite administrator performs a satellite-sync on an export, --keep-rpms will prevent the removal of packages from the export after the process.

Satellite 5.6 now supports PostgreSQL database deployments as an option for external database users in addition to Oracle databases. The Satellite 5.6 Embedded Database is also PostgreSQL.

Satellite 5.6 has the ability to perform an online backup of Embedded and ManagedDB database instances. This is provided by the online-backup option to the command line db-control tool.

The Satellite search index engine stored cache data on local disk. For the Satellite 5.6 release, this location has changed from /usr/share/rhn/search/indexes to /var/lib/rhn/search/indexes .

Satellite 5.6 displays packages installed on a registered system which are not present in any of the system's subscribed channels with the option to remove these packages. Satellite 5.6 also displays systems that have extra packages installed.

The option --use-update-date has been added to the spacewalk-clone-by-date command. This option allows users to set the clone date to the date the cloned channel was last updated instead of the default issue date.

When reprovisioning a system on the Web UI, if the kickstart profile selected has partitioning options that might destroy existing attached disks, a warning is issued by the UI. Users are warned that all partitions, including logical disks on attached SANs, will be destroyed. Users are offered the option to remove the disks from the server before kickstarting the machine or edit the kickstart profile's "--clearpart" option.

Red Hat Satellite now scans all published errata for the reboot_required keyword and will display systems which have applied the errata but have not rebooted.

Previously, Enhanced Reporting integration did not include non-Red Hat-based hypervisors. The virt-who package, which is normally supplied within Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 channels, is available as a technical preview within the RHN Tools channel as part of the Red Hat Satellite 5.6 release. Thus functionality sends the VMWare Host hypervisor information to the Satellite, allowing Host-Guest mappings. This is the same functionality provided in Red Hat Subscription Asset Manager and is a similar functionality provided by the rhn-virtualization-host package for RHEV-H, KVM and Xen Host-Guest mappings.

Satellite 5.6  has the ability to aggregate full SCAP results, collecting OVAL and XCCDF results into a fully downloadable HTML report for each scan. The extended information available in the report can help administrators investigate the possible causes of audit failure.

The organization administrator can configure this feature, setting up file size limits for individual SCAP files. This feature is turned off by default for each organization. It requires the latest spacewalk-oscap packages on the client systems in order to work properly.