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