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Release Notes

Red Hat Satellite 5.8

Product notes, new features, and known bugs for Red Hat Satellite 5.8

Red Hat Satellite Documentation Team

Abstract

This document contains a set of product notes, new features, and known bugs for Red Hat Satellite 5.8

1. Introduction

Red Hat Satellite is a system management solution that makes Red Hat infrastructure easier to deploy, scale, and manage across physical and virtual environments. Satellite helps users provision, configure, and update systems to keep them running efficiently, securely, and in compliance with various standards. By automating most system maintenance tasks, Red Hat Satellite helps organizations increase efficiency, reduce operational costs, and better respond to strategic business needs.

1.1. About this Release

This release of Red Hat Satellite 5 is based on the Spacewalk 2.4 release, and includes all beneficial commits up to the Spacewalk 2.6 release. See the Spacewalk Wiki for the latest information on the Spacewalk 2.6 release.
Only changes specific to Red Hat Satellite are included in this document. The release notes for the Spacewalk 2.6 release itself are found in the following location:
https://github.com/spacewalkproject/spacewalk/wiki/ReleaseNotes26

1.2. Supported Operating Systems

This release of Red Hat Satellite 5 can be installed on the following operating systems:
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

1.3. Supported Architectures

This release of Red Hat Satellite 5 can be installed on the following architectures:
  • x86_64
  • s390x

1.4. Supported Clients

This release of Red Hat Satellite 5 can manage the following client operating systems:
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7

2. Required Entitlements and Repositories

The packages provided in the following repositories are required to install and configure a functioning Red Hat Satellite 5.8 environment using CDN. When one of these repositories is required to install a package, the steps required to enable the repository are provided in the appropriate location in the Installation Guide.

Table 1. Red Hat Satellite Server

Subscription Pool
Repository Name
Repository Label
Details
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server
rhel-6-server-rpms
Provides the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Server.
Red Hat Satellite
Red Hat Satellite 5.8 (for RHEL 6 Server) (RPMs)
rhel-6-server-satellite-5.8-rpms
Provides the packages required to install and configure Red Hat Satellite 5.8.
Red Hat Satellite
Red Hat Satellite Proxy 5.8 (for RHEL 6 Server) (RPMs)
rhel-6-server-satellite-proxy-5.8-rpms
Provides the packages required to install and configure Red Hat Satellite Proxy Server 5.8.
Red Hat Satellite
Red Hat Satellite Managed DB 5.8 (for RHEL 6 Server) (RPMs)
rhel-6-server-satellite-manageddb-5.8-rpms
Provides the packages required to install and configure a managed database for Red Hat Satellite 5.8.

3. New Features and Enhancements

This section provides an overview of the top new features in this release of Red Hat Satellite 5.

3.1. Content Delivery Network Support

Previously, Red Hat Satellite 5 connected to the Red Hat Network (RHN) for general management and synchronization of content. With this release, Red Hat Satellite 5.8, and Satellite 5.8 only, has now been re-tooled to communicate with the successor to the Red Hat Network - the Red Hat Customer Portal and Content Delivery Network (CDN). Red Hat Satellite 5.8 now synchronizes content exclusively from the CDN, and no content is synchronized from RHN.
The CDN sync process used by Satellite 5.8 is configured to work with products that are available in Satellite 5 today and are not at their end-of-life (EOL). All currently mirrored content will be available after upgrading to Satellite 5.8, but after the upgrade you will not be able to re-sync content that is at or beyond its EOL. If you are planning a new install of Satellite 5.8 rather than an upgrade, and need to be able to sync this content, contact your account team to determine the best practices for your situation.

Note

With this release, customers synchronizing two or more Satellite Servers with each other will have two synchronization mechanisms at play: cdn-sync for synchronization with Red Hat, and satellite-sync for synchronizing with other Satellite Servers or from dumps.

3.2. Certificate Generation

This release introduces a new process to generate a Red Hat Satellite Manifest and activate your Satellite Server. It also introduces tooling changes that allow the rhn-satellite-activate script to refresh and download manifests from the Customer Portal. These enhancements are included as part of the transition from RHN.

3.3. TaskoTop

With this release, you can now monitor the health and well-being of the "behind the scenes" task management daemon Taskomatic using a new command-line tool, taskotop. As the name implies, the utility of this tool is similar to that of the Linux utility top in that you can introspect the state of the Taskomatic daemon.

3.4. Updated Back-End Technology

This release includes updates to the following supporting interfaces and underlying technologies:
  • Default database: PostgreSQL 9.5 DB from Software Collections (embedded, managed)
  • External DBA-managed Oracle support: Oracle 12c (continued supported interfaces for 10g and 11g)
  • Remaining mod_perl stack rewritten to Java
  • IBM Java 1.8.0 runtime environment

3.5. Fully Localized Web User Interface

With this release, all remaining PXT pages have now been re-written in Java. This enhancement provides the following key benefits:
  • The whole mod_perl stack has been removed.
  • The whole web user interface can now be fully localized.

3.6. New API Methods

This release adds the following API methods:
  • actionchain.addErrataUpdate
  • kickstart.listKickstartableTreeChannels
  • org.isErrataEmailNotifsForOrg
  • org.setErrataEmailNotifsForOrg
  • org.isOrgConfigManagedByOrgAdmin
  • org.setOrgConfigManagedByOrgAdmin
  • packages.listSourcePackages
  • packages.removeSourcePackage
  • system.getOsaPing
  • system.listSuggestedReboot
  • system.schedulePackageInstallByNevra
  • system.schedulePackageRemoveByNevra
  • system.sendOsaPing

3.7. New Command-Line Functions

This release adds the following commands to the spacecmd command-line interface:
  • kickstart_setsoftwaredetails
  • repo_updatessl
  • softwarechannel_errata_diff
  • softwarechannel_errata_sync
  • softwarechannel_getorgaccesstree
  • softwarechannel_listsyncschedule
  • softwarechannel_removesyncschedule

4. Known Issues

The following known issues exists in this release at this time:
BZ#1247344
At current, the Systems > Insights tab reports that there are no actions from systems in an organization when issues are filtered in accordance with severity (ALL, INFO, WARN, ERROR) and no issues correspond to the configured filters, even when issues exist for other severity levels. This issue will be resolved in an upcoming release to notify users that the number of issues detected corresponds to the specified severity level.

5. Deprecated Functionality

The following features have been deprecated, and are not included in this release:
  • Access to EOL channels
  • Server event monitoring
  • Solaris management
  • Subscription Asset Manager

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