Spacewalk is an open-source configuration management tool sponsored by Red Hat. Spacewalk is an alternate of the Redhat network satellite server on Centos/Fedora/Scientific Linux. Spacewalk is the upstream project for the source of the Red Hat Network Satellite.
It provides a management interface for software content across registered 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 on CentOS 6.X/RHEL 6.X
Step 1: Setup Spacewalk Repo.
# rpm -Uvh http://yum.spacewalkproject.org/1.9/RHEL/6/x86_64/spacewalk-repo-1.9-1.el6.noarch.rpm
Step 2: Setup Additional Repositories.
For Spacewalk on CentOS, RHEL 6 and Fedora, We nee additional dependencies that 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 or greater. EPEL – Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux contains a version of the openjdk that works with Spacewalk.
# rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
Step 3: Spacewalk Database Server Installation.
Spacewalk uses database to store its primary data , it supports either PostgreSQL or Oracle RDBMS. In our case we are using postgresql.
# yum install spacewalk-setup-embedded-postgresql
Step 4: Installing Spacewalk.
# yum install spacewalk-postgresql
Create a file under /root called 'answer' with below contents:
# vi /root/answers admin-email = root@localhost ssl-set-org = Nextstep4it ssl-set-org-unit = IT ssl-set-city = Delhi ssl-set-state = Delhi ssl-set-country = IN 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
Now Install Spacewalk with an Answer File.
# spacewalk-setup --disconnected –answer-file=/root/answers
After spacewalk-setup is complete, the application is ready to use. The above command will create the PostgreSQL database environment for spacewalk and will create ssl certificates and will start the services like tomcat.
Step 5: Access the Spacewalk using the below URL and set an administrative account.
Open Web browser and type 'https://[Hostname/IP]', replace host-name or ip address according to your setup. After Setting the Administrative account, we can login to spacewalk admin GUI:
Spacewalk Service Commands:
# /usr/sbin/spacewalk-service [stop|start|restart]