RHBA-2014:1206 - Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

Updated virt-who packages that fix several bugs and add various enhancements are
now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

Description

The virt-who package provides an agent that collects information about virtual
guests present in the system and reports them to the subscription manager.

The virt-who package has been upgraded to upstream version 0.9, which provides a
number of bug fixes and enhancements over the previous version.
Notably, the permissions for the configuration file has been changed from
world-readable to root-only readable. This change is only for new installations
of virt-who; existing installations should be fixed manually by setting the
permission of the /etc/sysconfig/virt-who file to 600. (BZ#861552)

This update also fixes the following bugs:

• Prior to this update, the configuration file for virt-who contained incorrect

permissions and was world-readable, although this file can contain passwords. As
a consequence, any user could read the passwords from the configuration file. To
fix this bug, the permissions have been changed to be root-readable only, and
non-root users can no longer read passwords from the virt-who configuration
file. (BZ#1088756)

• Previously, the virt-who utility did not report the state of virtual guests to

the Subscription Asset Manager (SAM) server. To fix this bug, the info() method
from libvirt has been used, and the state of a virtual machine is now reported
to the SAM server. (BZ#1124732)

In addition, this update adds the following enhancements:

• With this update, support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager

virtualization back end has been added to virt-who. Now, the user can use
virt-who on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.11.0 to gather host/guest associations
from Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager. (BZ#1009401)

• Although virt-who worked properly with VMware ESX software, the support for

VMware ESXi software was not functional due to differences between ESX and ESXi.
With this update, support for ESXi as virtualization back end has been provided
for virt-who, which can now use both ESX and ESXi as virtualization back ends.
(BZ#1078858)

Users of virt-who are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which fix
these bugs and add these enhancements.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously released errata
relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via the Red Hat Network. Details on how to
use the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at
https://access.redhat.com/site/articles/11258

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 5 i386

Fixes

• BZ - 861552 - There's error log of virt-who after adding a new guest in ESX mode
• BZ - 864791 - Virt-who status show as "virt-who dead but subsys locked" after kill the running virt-who server by press "ctrl+c" key.
• BZ - 975340 - RHEV-M and HYPER-V mode missed in virt-who default configure file
• BZ - 990957 - virt-who creat a null system in SAM server in esx mode
• BZ - 991379 - virt-who is missing dependency on python-uuid and python-hashlib
• BZ - 993822 - Can't get the host/guest association in the HYPER-V mode
• BZ - 1004247 - VirtError message appears in the terminal which bring up virt-manager when migrate the guest
• BZ - 1009401 - virt-who: rhevm mode not supported in rhel 5.10
• BZ - 1088756 - Wrong permission for configuration file /etc/sysconfig/virt-who
• BZ - 1092811 - It will generate error log after restart virt-who
• BZ - 1092818 - Can't kill the running virt-who by press "ctrl+c" key one time when virt-who is running on the CLI
• BZ - 1092848 - virt-who dies when the system is being unregistered
• BZ - 1095597 - Virt-who should report guest attributes in order to support virt-guest-limit feature
• BZ - 1124732 - Can't display guests' "state" in the virt-who log

CVEs

• CVE-2014-0189

References

(none)