[Spacewalk-list] Spacewalk 1.8 Centos/RedHat and mrepo setup

[Paul Robert Marino]

I have RHEL, Scientific Linux, Fedora on my spacewalk servers and soon
I'm going to be adding Centos and I may add Ubuntu in the future. Its
not a problem until you introduce erratas. There is still a legacy
portion of the original RHN Satellite design that needs to be updated
which causes problems when you publish erratas, but there is an
effective workaround until the ticket to fix the API gets worked on.

The workaround is this no errata can span more than 1 base channel. so
for each base channel you have to recreate the erratas with a
different name specific to that base channel. most of the errata sync
scripts can be coaxed to do this either by design or wrapper script.
If you do allow your erratas to span multiple base channels then you
risk cross channel contamination between them which breaks the
contaminated channel.
This risk pops up between Scientific Linux, RHEL, and CentOS or if you
have an x86_64 and an IA32 base channel for the same distribution on
the same spacewalk server.

The problem stems from here

sample from the rhn.conf man page
"
       enable_nvrea (boolean)
              This parameter controls whether server will allow
package uploads for same NVREA (Name, Version, Release, Epoch, Arch)
but different vendors.

              ·  Spacewalk Server

                 ·  Default: 1

              ·  RHN Satellite Server

                 ·  Default: 0
"

Unfortunately the portion of the API's that adds packages to erratas
is currently written around the assumption that the enable_nvrea
option will always be 0, or more precise that the option doesn't exist
because satellite was originally designed only to support 1 distro
(RHEL).



If you are interested the details of the root cause of the issue take
a look at this bug ticket
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=834569




On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 9:28 AM, Tom Brown <tom at ng23.net> wrote:
>
>>
>> So: can I connect a Centos client and a redhat client (same version) to the same spacewalk server, and have both Centos and RedHat channels of the same base version in that Spacewalk setup (presumably using the two-channel approach discussed above) when using Spacewalk 1.8?
>
> Yes
>
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