RHN Satellite Goes Open Source: Project Spacewalk

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For nearly seven years, Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite has provided an easy-to-use systems management platform for your Linux infrastructure, making Linux deployable, scalable and manageable. RHN Satellite provides administrators with the tools to efficiently manage their systems, lowering per-system, deployment and management costs. As we continue to define and evolve our management solutions and search for new and innovative management ideas, the time has come for us to explore new horizons.

Today, at the Red Hat Summit in Boston, Mass., we’ve introduced Project Spacewalk.

Spacewalk is an open source (GPLv2) Linux systems management solution. It allows you to:

• Inventory your systems (hardware and software information)
• Install and update software on your systems
• Collect and distribute your custom software packages into manageable groups
• Provision (kickstart) your systems
• Manage and deploy configuration files to your systems
• Monitor your systems
• Provision virtual guests
• Start/stop/configure virtual guests

Spacewalk is the upstream project upon which RHN Satellite will now be based. Spacewalk will work with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora and other Red Hat Enterprise Linux derivative distributions like CentOS and Scientific Linux. Spacewalk will bring together a growing community of new users along with seasoned systems management veterans. In this way, the Satellite product can grow (as Linux itself does) with the combined efforts of the open source leader, Red Hat, and an invigorated community. Both will work together to expand the capabilities and stature of the upstream project. This will translate into faster adoption of new, innovative ideas and technologies into the downstream Satellite product.

One of our top priorities is to to include “best of breed” open source technology where possible. Our first such integration will be providing support for Cobbler to provide provisioning in Spacewalk/Satellite. We will also be evaluating the inclusion of or integration with many more open source projects as we begin to piece together a project roadmap, for example:

• pulp
• func
• FOSS DB Alternatives

Additionally, we will be working on re-organizing Spacewalk down into smaller more consumable sub-projects to make them usable by other projects and tools.

The project is live today and you can build from source or simply install the pre-built binaries for your distribution from our hosted yum-repo. Please visit our wiki for more information on how to get the source and install the software.

Get involved and join the community. Provide us feedback on the project so far and your systems management needs. Submit a patch or two. Get involved in technical discussions on our mailing list. Help us build free and open source next-generation systems management solutions.