[Spacewalk-list] Spacewalk mystery and misery

[Michael Mraka]

Abhishek Lahiri wrote:
% Hi,
% 
% I have inherited a Spacewalk server that we use to pull down latest rpms. Recently for the bash zero day vulnerability I ran the following command to get the latest bash rpm and I see them added to the continuous release channels through the Web UI.
% 
% I go ahead and add it the package to other cloned channels (we maintain a bunch of cloned channel , cloned at different points in time) and don’t get an error in the Web UI.

Can you see the package in the webUI? Does it belong to all channels
you sync'ed / cloned it into?

% However from the client side when I do a yum list —showduplicates bash , I don’t see the latest rpm.

Does the webUI system overview for this client show bash as an available update?
On the client if you clean the yum cache (yum clean all) does subsequent
yum list —showduplicates bash show it?

% Also using the RHN python API when I do a packages.search() I see only the old versions of the rpm, not the latest one.
% 
% It seems to me there is some disconnect between the Web UI and what is actually there.. I am not even sure what is wrong here. My predecessor had often complained about how he had to wait for infinity for tasknomotic to finish whatever it is doing. But neither he or myself have any idea what tasknomotic is doing, how we can speed up the process, and how we can quickly get a latest rpm to all the channels as we want to .. It is a big and frustrating mystery about how all the components work. I was hoping someone can shed some light on this and deliver us from this misery …

Is taskomatic running? Is new bash listed in
/var/cache/rhn/repodata/<channel>/primary.xml.gz?
Is there a any record about regenerating repo for <channel> in
taskomatic log (/var/log/rhn/rhn_taskomatic_daemon.log)?


Regards,

--
Michael Mráka
Satellite Engineering, Red Hat