Chapter 5. Release Information

These release notes highlight technology preview items, recommended practices, known issues, and deprecated functionality to be taken into consideration when deploying this release of Red Hat Satellite 6. Notes for updates released during the support lifecycle of this Red Hat Satellite 6 release will appear in the advisory text associated with each update.

5.1. Enhancements

This release of Red Hat Satellite 6 features the following enhancements:

BZ#1152515 You can configure a Content View to resolve package dependencies on publishing by navigating to a Content View and selecting the Solve Dependencies check box. You can configure two global settings for the dependency solving feature: 1. You can configure the dependency solving feature to be enabled or disabled by default by navigating to Administer > Settings > Content and changing the Content View Dependency Solving Default setting. 2. You can select the dependency solving algorithm that you want to apply by navigating to Administer > Settings > Content and changing the Content View Dependency Solving Algorithm setting. When the Solve Dependencies check box is selected for a Content View, Satellite checks repositories in the Content View for dependency conflicts and overwrites Content View filters to resolve existing conflicts. The dependency solving feature has three caveats: 1. Publishing a Content View with the dependency solving feature enabled takes approximately three times longer. 2. The dependency solving feature does not resolve dependency conflicts across repositories. 3. You must ensure that the Content View with the dependency solving feature enabled works correctly after publishing. Content Views still might have dependency conflicts in an errata workflow and when working with custom repositories.

BZ#1559006 In Red Hat Satellite 6.6, you can now select a destination storage domain when creating a host on Red Hat Virtualization. When selecting a template that includes disks for a host, you can change the storage domain and the storage allocation. This clones the disk from the template and changes the storage domain and allocation of the cloned disk, allowing you to select a destination storage domain without needing to manually clone the disk in Red Hat Virtualization first.

BZ#1658265 Previously, if you had an HTTP proxy configured in Satellite, the virt-who configuration attempted to use the HTTP proxy to submit virt-who data and failed. With this release, virt-who ignores the HTTP proxy setting and submits data to Satellite directly.

BZ#1684573 Ansible 2.8 is now supported.

BZ#1698148 Red Hat Satellite 6.6 now supports passing through SWID tag data when it is provided in a repository which is being synced.

BZ#1730648 Previously, Satellite created duplicated profiles for RHEL-based hypervisors causing them to consume twice as many subscriptions. Users had to configure virt-who in VDSM mode manually on RHEL-based hypervisors prior to registering them to Satellite. From Satellite 6.6 onwards, Satellite creates unique profiles for RHEL-based hypervisors. Therefore, you must first register RHEL-based hypervisors with subscription-manager and then configure virt-who using the virt-who configuration tool in the Satellite web UI.

BZ#1738199 Previously, using yum to update or install packages on the Satellite base operating system might have also updated the packages related to Satellite and resulted in system inconsistency. With this release, Satellite prevents users from installing and updating packages with yum. Instead, you must use foreman-maintain packages install and foreman-maintain packages update commands. Note that foreman-maintain runs the satellite-installer --upgrade script after installing packages and therefore some services are restarted. You can disable this feature and control the stability of the system yourself if you want. This feature is not enabled on Capsule Server.

5.2. Technology Preview

The items listed in this section are provided as Technology Previews. For further information on the scope of Technology Preview status, and the associated support implications, see Technology Preview Features Support Scope.

Container-native Virtualization Plug-in
The Container-native Virtualization Plug-in is now available in Satellite 6.6 as a Technology Preview feature.
Kernel Execution (kexec) Template
The Kernel execution template for PXE-less boot methods, which was introduced in Satellite 6.2, continues to be available as a Technology Preview feature.
Tracer
Integration with the Tracer tool, which was introduced in Satellite 6.3, continues to be available as a Technology Preview feature.

5.3. Release Notes

This section outlines important details about the release, including recommended practices and notable changes to Red Hat Satellite. You must take this information into account to ensure the best possible outcomes for your deployment.

BZ#1612800 For VMware hypervisors, you can now filter and exclude host parents through the Satellite web UI, API, and Hammer CLI.

BZ#1658284 Three new intervals for the virt-who configuration have been added: 24 hours, 2 days, and 3 days. You can now configure Satellite to run the virt-who at the following intervals: every hour, every 2 hours, every 4 hours, every 8 hours, every 12 hours, every 24 hours, every 2 days, or every 3 days.

5.4. Known Issues

These known issues exist in Red Hat Satellite 6 at this time:

BZ#1578911 When you provision a host using the VMware compute resource, you can only select the default resource pool. If you try to select a different resource pool, provisioning fails. As a workaround, disable the cache on the compute resource.

BZ#1649927 Using the Hammer CLI, there are problems provisioning from an image using the VMware compute resource. As a workaround, specify the image_id in the --compute-attributes option in the Hammer CLI, for example, --compute-attributes="image_id='500d7545-8e17-ce0f-4011-79c5c2c88e49'.

BZ#1678179 In the Satellite web UI, the bulk action feature for the set repositories of content hosts does not list the custom product repositories. An empty list is displayed rather than a list of the custom repositories.

BZ#1686245 If you download Kickstart repositories with an "On Demand" policy, Satellite stores the files incorrectly and this causes problems during provisioning. Use only the "Immediate" policy for Kickstart repositories.

BZ#1692753 The description of the location_id and organization_id parameters are unclear in the ApiDoc and the error message for these parameters is incorrect. You must use these parameters to set the context scope for an API query, but not to update a location or organization of a compute resource. If you use this command to update a compute resource, an API request returns the wrong error message "Compute resource doesn’t exist".

BZ#1713401 When you apply the OSPP security policy to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 system during provisioning, the katello-ca-consumer package cannot be installed from Satellite Server. Therefore, the system cannot be registered as a content host. As a workaround, after the system is provisioned, install the katello-ca-consumer with the following command and then register the system manually: # rpm -Uvh --nodigest --nofiledigest http://satellite.example.com/pub/katello-ca-consumer-latest.noarch.rpm

BZ#1719175 If an HTTP proxy password contains special characters, such as "?", Insights uploads fail with the "407 Proxy Authentication Required" error. Do not use special characters in an HTTP proxy password.

BZ#1719636 If you edit the subscription information for hosts in Satellite, the hosts do not display in the audit records of the Satellite web UI. Instead of a list of hosts, the following error is displayed: "Missing(ID: 2)" in "Host ids" line.

BZ#1720369 Entering the following command can lead to broken symlinks for repository metadata. Do not enter this command until BZ#1720369 is resolved. # foreman-rake katello:delete_orphaned_content RAILS_ENV=production If you have broken symlinks, regenerate the yum repository metadata.

BZ#1728612 Ansible jobs always use the sudo become_method. If you change the Effective User Method, the changed setting only affects SSH remote execution jobs, not Ansible jobs.

BZ#1732657 Client registration with subscription-manager in Satellite 6.5 and later is slower than in previous versions, because of additional audit and facts data being stored during registration.

BZ#1743706 Satellite Server operating in FIPS mode cannot connect to an external MongoDB server. To use FIPS mode and MongoDB, use the internal MongoDB.

BZ#1745724 The hammer organization command shows a warning for deprecated options even when those options are not used. The command still works without issue; if you are not using the deprecated options you can ignore the warnings.

BZ#1745835 Full Capsule synchronization fails and does not fully publish new metadata.

BZ#1750239 If you attach subscriptions to hosts during registration using activation keys, Satellite attaches subscriptions incorrectly. Instead, use auto-attach.

BZ#1750248 Rotated log files are not reopened even when a HUP signal is sent to the foreman-proxy daemon. As a result, deleted files are reported as still open, logging does not work correctly, and log records can be lost. You can check for deleted files by running the following command:

lsof | grep deleted | grep "\/var\/log"

To work around this issue, restart the foreman-proxy service after logs are rotated.

BZ#1754314 Satellite hosts that use katello-agent might experience a memory leak caused by the qpid-proton package.

BZ#1754881 Foreman-maintain fails to restore data from some backups due to issues reading tar files. In a future release, foreman-maintain will be updated to use GNU tar to support all tar archive edge cases.

BZ#1758645 You cannot provision a VMware virtual machine with the ESXi 6.7 U2 hardware version from Satellite.

BZ#1759021 The documentation button in Hosts → Content Hosts → Register Content Host returns a 404 error. The URL changed but was not updated in the Satellite web UI. To access the correct document, navigate to https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_satellite/6.6/html/managing_hosts/registering_hosts manually.

BZ#1759588 The foreman-maintain packages update all command does not work. To update all packages on the Satellite base operating system, enter the foreman-maintain packages update \\* command.

5.5. Deprecated Functionality

The items in this section are either no longer supported or will no longer be supported in a future release.

BZ#1670092 In Red Hat Satellite 6.6, the hammer csv command for importing or exporting resources has been removed. You can still use the hammer --csv command to generate formatted output only.

BZ#1698182 In Red Hat Satellite 6.6, the foreman_docker plug-in has been removed, therefore it is no longer possible to provision containers.

BZ#1713222 The --environment and --environment-id options of the hammer command are deprecated because of confusion between lifecycle and Puppet environments. Use the --lifecycle-environment or --puppet-environment options instead.

BZ#1716615 Subscription Events for content hosts (Hosts > Content Hosts > Host name > Subscriptions > Events in the Satellite web UI) are deprecated and will be removed in a future release.

BZ#1741454 Both foreman_organization and foreman_location fact values were deprecated for discovery, use discovery_organization or discovery_location fact values instead. Ensure that the subnet in which the discovered node is detected also belongs to the organization and location set by the fact, otherwise Satellite refuses to set it for security reasons.