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These release notes reference both RHN Satellite Server and RHN Satellite Server with Embedded Database. Satellite customers will also benefit from enhancements made to Red Hat Network as a whole. For this reason, customers are encouraged to also examine RHN Release Notes and the latest RHN Reference Guide available at https://rhn.redhat.com/help/ for changes made to Red Hat Network since the previous release.
The RHN Satellite Server Installation Program has been overhauled. The download and installation of required packages is now automated, as are many of the configuration steps previously handled via the web interface. The changes include the following:
Required packages are now installed from the /updates/RPMS/ and /bootstrap/ directories of the Satellite Installation ISO. This means that the Satellite only needs the @ Base package group during initial Red Hat Enterprise Linux installation.
Registration (or re-registration) with RHN is handled automatically
Database installation (for the Embedded Database) or database connection (for the Stand-Alone Database) are now handled at the command line of the installer.
Satellite certificate activation is handled from the command line
SSL Cert generation is handled at the command line
The Satellite Installation Program now accepts an answer file, which allows for the installation to be automated. An example answer file may be found in the install/answers.txt file of the Satellite Installation Program ISO.
Final customization of features such as Monitoring and Bootstrap script generation are handled in a web interface at the end of installation.
The web interface to Kickstart has been completely overhauled. The changed pages, which can be reached from Systems ⇒ Kickstart and System Details ⇒ Provisioning, include the following:
A new Kickstart Profile creation wizard, which takes you through the steps necessary to create a new profile.
A new Kickstart page, which displays the status of previously scheduled kickstarts, the number of profiles and the operating systems to which they refer, and a short list of common kickstart tasks.
A Bare Metal kickstart page, which allows you to kickstart systems according to an IP address range
The Your RHN page has changed to improve usability and to allow customization of the page. The following modules are available for this page:
Tasks — A task-oriented menu of quick links to different areas of the RHN user interface.
Inactive Systems — Lists the registered RHN systems that recently stopped checking in.
Most Critical Systems — A listing of the systems with the most critical update and health status.
Recently Scheduled Actions — Lists the scheduled actions of the user.
Relevant Security Errata — View the most recent errata either applicable to your systems or all available
System Groups — Preview the overall status of your system groups.
These modules can be selected on the Your RHN ⇒ Your Preferences page.
You can also select the language in which RHN is displayed by making a selection on the Locale Preferences page.
While RHN now supports the display of multiple languages, it does not at this time accept input in non-ascii characters.
Lastly, you may also choose a timezone that corresponds to your location.
Monitoring data and probe status information that was previously availble only through the web interface of the Satellite can now be exported as a CSV file. The exported data may include, but is not limited to:
Probe status
All probes in a given state (OK, WARN, UNKNOWN, CRITICAL, PENDING)
A Probe Event history
This update includes an improvement in dependency resolution for up2date on Solaris. It no longer fails to resolve dependencies for required packages that are installed on the current system, but are not included in the subscribed channel.
If the MPM file being pushed into a Solaris channel on the Satellite is the same as an existing file, rhnpush now exits with an error code that indicates that you must use the --force option to overwrite the existing file. Two MPM files are considered identical if they have the same name, version, release, and architecture. Differences in build time or build host are not enough to differentiate two MPM files.
The up2date for Solaris command now understands obsoleted patches. A Solaris patch now installs correctly if it requires a patch which is not in the current channel, if an obsoleting patch is present instead.
Changes to solaris2mpm now correct an error in the MPM files it generated. These MPM files did not include themselves in their "provides" information. This update resolves the resulting dependency resolution error in up2date on Solaris.
The up2date command for Solaris was incorrectly handling the --installall option when the --channel option referred to a child channel. In such cases, up2date installed all packages in both the parent and child channels. This bug has been fixed, and specifying a child channel results in the installation of packages in the child channel only.
This release fixes a bug in the --installall option of up2date for Solaris. Previously, running up2date --installall on a channel with a patch cluster in it caused up2date to install each patch twice - once as an individual patch and once as part of the patch cluster.
Previously, when installing a Solaris patch cluster or a batch of patches with up2date --installall, an individual patch failure caused up2date to fail with an exception error. With this update, up2date now installs as many patches from the set as possible, providing a warning message to the user when a patch fails to install.
Due to a bug in python, it is important that ulimit -n not be set to unlimited. Doing so causes solaris2mpm to fail.
A bug that caused rhnpush to fail on Red Hat Enterprise Linux2.1 for Itanium has been addressed.
This release addresses a regression that caused rhnpush to be unable to push packages from read-only file systems.
Two significant additions to rhnpush's error handling have been made.
First, if rhnpush fails to upload a package, it sleeps for 3 seconds before making a second attempt. If the second attempt fails, rhnpush exits with the error code '1'.
Second, the --tolerant option has been added to rhnpush. If this option is specified at the command line, rhnpush skips any packages that fail to upload and attempts to push the next file.
The rhnpush command now returns a non-zero value when exiting with an error.
The rhnpush utility now checks to see if a package already exists on the Satellite before pushing the package. It does this by comparing the MD5 sum of the package on the local system with that of similar packages on the Satellite. If no match exists, the package is pushed to the Satellite.
The way rhnpush interacts with its configuration files has been improved. It no longer automatically generates ~/.rhnpushrc and ./.rhnpushrc files whenever rhnpush is called. It does, however, read these files if they exist; the ./.rhnpushrc configuration file has precedence over the ~/.rhnpushrc file.
The taskomatic process, which was previously a perl process, has been converted to a Java daemon.
The Satellite Tools ⇒ Satellite Configuration options have been overhauled. The various configuration options for your Satellite are now available under five tabs:
General: Allows you to configure the hostname and admin email of the Satellite. Also allows you to enable and disable Monitoring and Solaris support, and finally allows you to choose to run in Disconnected mode, if appropriate.
Monitoring: Allows you to configure your Monitoring setup
Certificate: Allows you to upload and activate a new Satellite certificate
Bootstrap Script: Here you can generate a new boostrap script, which will be placed in the /pub/bootstrap/ directory of the Satellite.
Restart: If at any time you need to restart the Satellite, use the option on this screen. This ensures that the database and all services are shut down and restarted in the proper order.
The logs that previously existed in:
/opt/notifications/var
/home/nocpulse/var
are now symlinked to the /var/log/nocpulse/ directory. This has been done in order to centralize log files within the /var/log/ directory.
The YourRHN ⇒ Subscription Management page has been updated. Add-on entitlements are available in the drop-down selection box only if there are entitlements available. The number of used and available entitlements are now more clearly displayed beneath the list of systems.
There are also two new sub-pages available from this page:
Software Channel Entitlements Page
Software Channels Page
A bug in osa-distpatcher caused it to stop iterating through the list of clients if one of them was not reachable. As a result, no other clients received notification of pending actions until the unreachable client became available. This release fixes this issue.
This release fixes a bug that caused rhn-satellite-activate to fail to update the number of channel family entitlements available to an organization when uploading a new Satellite certificate. For example, rhn-satellite-activate would correctly update the number of Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS entitlements, but would not update the number of ES or WS entitlements. With this release, rhn-satellite-activate correctly updates all entitlements.
A bug in the Your RHN page, which did not display the correct number of Total Systems for an organization, has been fixed as part of the general Your RHN overhaul.
The rhnmd daemon now works properly on AMD 64 and Intel EM64T systems that are running the 32-bit version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
It is now possible to change the name of a custom channel after creation.
A bug has been fixed in the graphing function of probe data on the web interface. This change allows the graphed period to start at times in the 12:00 to 12:59 range.
The bootstrap.sh script requires that an activation key is specified during its creation. If an activation key is not specified, the script exits with an error code. A bug has been fixed that left the error code in place even when an activation key was specified.
The rhn-bootstrap utility, which generates bootstrap.sh scripts, now strips path information from the --gpg-key option.This is because the bootstrap.sh script fails if it attempts to use the full system path in the URL when downloading the GPG key.
The Channels ⇒ Custom Software Channels ⇒ Packages page now displays all versions of a package available in the custom channel.
It is no longer possible to subscribe one system to another system's Sandbox. The Sandbox is an experimental configuration channel to which a single system has access. This restriction is meant to protect production systems. If, however, files in a Sandbox channel are deemed safe, they may still be moved into a global configuration channel for wider deployment.
The user creation email that is generated for organizations using PAM authentication now correctly sends the user's email address instead of replacing the email with the md5 hash of their password.
A bug that caused configuration file diffs scheduled via a Satellite to fail has been fixed. This bug appeared in the rhncfg packages.
A new page, Locale Preferences, has been added to the web interface. On this page, you can select the language in which the interface is presented as well as the timezone for your location. This page may be found from the Your RHN ⇒ Locale Preferences.
In some instances, an RHN Satellite failed to deploy the necessary Jabber configuration files to RHN Proxy systems created by the Satellite. This occured if the Satellite had RHN Push enabled, but not Monitoring. This release corrects this issue.
Three improvements have been made to the API:
It is now possible enable API interaction logging. When enabled, interactions are logged in /var/log/rhn/rhn_api.log.
a new network interface has been added, system.get_network_devices
Input — session key for logged in user and sid for system
This network interface returns an array of maps representing the network devices for a given system.
Each map contains — name, ip, broadcast, hardware_address, netmask, and module
A new method has been added to the API that allows you to delete a package from the hard drive of the Satellite.
A bug that caused Kickstart to ignore the Sync Package Profile With Package Profile option has been fixed.
The Base Channel listed in the System Overview page for each system now links directly to the Channel Details page for that base channel.
The Red Hat Network FAQ has been deprecated. In a future release, the FAQ will be removed. The content will be available and maintained as part of the Red Hat Knowledgebase.
The following release notes should have been included with the Satellite Release Notes for versions 4.0.5 and 4.0.6.
A bug in osa-dispatcher that caused it to hang if jabberd failed has been fixed. It now re-establishes its connection to the Satellite if the connection is lost.
The osad daemon no longer overwrites previous configuration files when installed.