Installing spacewalk

Spacewalk is the software behind Red Hat Network. I’ve been meaning to take a closer look for a while now. With a new release out that’s got improved cobbler integration I decided it was time to take the plunge. Having a shiny web GUI on top of cobbler seems like it could be rather neat.

Getting spacewalk installed is a bit of work since it (a) is huge, (b) needs an oracle database. But the published installation instructions worked fine for me:

Get a new Centos VM: ./make-centos32.py spacewalk. Note that Oracle express is 32 bit-only, so I decided to just do everything as a 32 bit install. Change the VM settings to use 1.5GB ram which seems like it is just about enough for development/demo purposes (specified minimum is 2GB).

Now, follow spacewalk instructions to set up Oracle Express:

$ sudo bash
# cat >>/etc/hosts <>/etc/hosts <   oracle-instantclient11.2-basic-11.2.0.2.0.i386.rpm \
>   oracle-instantclient11.2-sqlplus-11.2.0.2.0.i386.rpm

# export SWREPO=http://spacewalk.redhat.com/yum/1.4
# export EPEL=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel
# rpm -Uvh $SWREPO/RHEL/5/i386/spacewalk-repo-1.4-1.el5.noarch.rpm
# rpm -Uvh $EPEL/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
# rpm -Uvh $SWREPO//RHEL/5/i386/spacewalk-client-repo-1.4-1.el5.noarch.rpm

# yum -y install oracle-lib-compat

# /etc/init.d/oracle-xe configure
HTTP port for Oracle Application Express: 9055
Database listener port: 1521
Password for SYS/SYSTEM: changeme12
Start at boot: y
# sqlplus 'sys/@//localhost/XE as sysdba'
SQL> create user spacewalk identified by spacewalk default tablespace users;
SQL> grant dba to spacewalk;
SQL> quit

# sqlplus spacewalk/spacewalk@//localhost/XE
SQL> alter system set processes = 400 scope=spfile; 
SQL> alter system set "_optimizer_filter_pred_pullup"=false scope=spfile; 
SQL> alter system set "_optimizer_cost_based_transformation"=off scope=spfile; 
SQL> quit  
# /sbin/service oracle-xe restart

Well that wasn’t so bad. I seem to recall installing oracle as being much harder and taking at least a day or two if you know what you’re doing. Maybe it’s just that the XE edition is so much easier, or maybe Oracle have just learned a trick or two in the 5? (wow!) years since I last touched it.

Now we’re ready to install spacewalk. The right yum repo configs were already imported, above, so we don’t need to do that again.

# yum install curl
# curl -o /tmp/gpg-key http://www.redhat.com/security/37017186.txt
# mv /tmp/gpg-key /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-redhat-release
# yum install spacewalk-oracle
...
Transaction Summary
=================================
Install     287 Package(s)
Upgrade       0 Package(s)

Total download size: 198 M
...

One of these packages results in the enabling of SELINUX. Let’s disable it again:

# echo 0 > /selinux/enforce
# vi /etc/selinux/config # change to SELINUX=disabled
# reboot

And now we can configure:

spacewalk-setup --disconnected
Database service name (SID)? XE
Username? spacewalk
Password? spacewalk
Admin Email Address? root@localhost
Should setup configure apache's default ssl server
    for you (saves original ssl.conf) [Y]? y
CA certificate password? spacewalk
Re-enter CA certificate password? spacewalk
Organization? spacewalk
Organization Unit [spacewalk.sandbox]? spacewalk
Email Address [root@localhost]? root@localhost
City? London
State? UK
Country code (Examples: "US", "JP", "IN",
    or type "?" to see a list)? GB

Now open https://spacewalk.sandbox/ in a web browser and create the admin account spacewalk/spacewalk.

Now to figure out how to make use of this beast….here’s a pretty good presentation from DevOps London about it: