Overview:


Spacewalk is an open source configuration management tool sponsoredby Red Hat. Spacewalk is alternate of Redhat network satellite server on Centos/ Fedora / Scientific Linux. Spacewalk is the upstream project for the sourceof Red Hat Network Satellite.

It provides a management interface for software content acrossregistered servers. Some of important Features of Spacewalk are mentioned below:

  • Manage     Inventory of Servers (hardware and software information)

  • Install and     update software on Servers

  • Manage and     deploy configuration files to your systems

  • Monitor your     systems / Servers


Spacewalk Installation Steps onCentOS / RHEL  


Step: 1  Setup SpacewalkRepo.


#rpm -Uvh http://yum.spacewalkproject.org/1.9/RHEL/6/x86_64/spacewalk-repo-1.9-1.el6.noarch.rpm


Step: 2 Setup AdditionalRepositories.


For Spacewalk on RHEL 6 and Fedora, We need additional dependenciesthat are needed from jpackage. Create a file using below command:

cat > /etc/yum.repos.d/jpackage-generic.repo << EOF
[jpackage-generic]
name=JPackage generic
#baseurl=http://mirrors.dotsrc.org/pub/jpackage/5.0/generic/free/
mirrorlist=http://www.jpackage.org/mirrorlist.php?dist=generic&type=free&release=5.0
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://www.jpackage.org/jpackage.asc
EOF


Enable EPEL Repository:


Spacewalk requires a Java Virtual Machine with version 1.6.0 orgreater. EPEL - Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux contains a version of theopenjdk that works with Spacewalk.

# rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm


Step:3 Spacewalk Database ServerInstallation


Spacewalk uses database to store its primary data , it supportseither  PostgreSQL  or Oracle RDBMS. In our case we are usingpostgresql.

# yum install spacewalk-setup-embedded-postgresql


Step:4 Installing Spacewalk


# yum install spacewalk-postgresql

Create a file under /rootcalled “answer” with below contents :

# vi /root/answers

admin-email = root@localhost

ssl-set-org = PCCW

ssl-set-org-unit = IT

ssl-set-city = Shanghai

ssl-set-state = Shanghai

ssl-set-country = CN

ssl-password = spacewalkpasswd

ssl-set-email = root@localhost

ssl-config-sslvhost = Y

db-backend=postgresql

db-name=spacewalkdb

db-user=spacewalk

db-password=spacewalkpasswd

db-host=localhost
db-port=5432

enable-tftp=Y


Configure Spacewalk with an Answer File


# spacewalk-setup --disconnected–answer-file=/root/answers

After spacewalk-setup is complete , application is ready to use.Above command will create the postgresql database environment for spacewalk andwill create ssl certificates and will start the services like tomcat.


Step:5 Access the Spacewalk usingbelow URL and set administrative account.


Open Web browser and type "https://<Hostname / IP>",replace hostname or ip address according to your setup

After Setting theAdministrative account , we can login to spacewalk admin GUI:


Spacewalk Service


# /usr/sbin/spacewalk-service[stop|start|restart]