We're sorry but this page doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please enable it to continue.
Feedback

Spacewalk - Free & Open Source Lifecycle Management

00:00

Formal Metadata

Title
Spacewalk - Free & Open Source Lifecycle Management
Alternative Title
Spacewalk Linux Systems Lifecycle Management
Title of Series
Number of Parts
97
Author
License
CC Attribution 2.0 Belgium:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
Identifiers
Publisher
Release Date
Language

Content Metadata

Subject Area
Genre
Abstract
Brief introduction of the Spacewalk systems management solution with a short live demo. Spacewalk is a free and open source lifecycle management which provides software management, provisioning and monitoring capabilities. The clean web interface allows viewing of systems and their software update status, as well as initiating actions like kickstarting systems or managing configuration files. Spacewalk's monitoring feature lets you view monitoring status for your systems alongside their software update status. Spacewalk also has virtualization capabilities to enable you to provision, control, manage, and monitor virtual Xen and KVM guests.
5
15
Thumbnail
48:33
41
Thumbnail
35:21
47
48
Thumbnail
1:03:30
50
75
Thumbnail
50:56
94
Software developerOpen sourceProjective planeCartesian coordinate systemFile formatDigital rights managementDistribution (mathematics)NumberCyberspaceSatelliteServer (computing)Video gameCycle (graph theory)Computer animationLecture/Conference
Server (computing)Service (economics)Front and back endsMoment (mathematics)Java appletTelecommunicationHydraulic jumpComputer fileWeb 2.0Formal verificationINTEGRALGraphical user interfaceGastropod shellMacro (computer science)Set (mathematics)InformationCycle (graph theory)MereologyProcess (computing)Physical systemComponent-based software engineeringCASE <Informatik>CuboidRollback (data management)Functional (mathematics)Video gameState of matterContrast (vision)Different (Kate Ryan album)Distribution (mathematics)BootingProfil (magazine)MultilaterationMathematical optimizationComputer configurationTask (computing)AbstractionWordRepository (publishing)Installation artComputer hardwareVirtual machineConfiguration spaceDigital rights managementForm (programming)Revision controlOpen sourceMessage passingNumberGroup actionSoftwareStrategy gameProjective planeSoftware engineeringProduct (business)Enterprise architectureIntegrated development environmentConfiguration managementComplete metric spaceCircleCyberspaceProxy serverSession Initiation ProtocolFormal grammarAssociative propertySatelliteClosed setSoftware developerLattice (order)FacebookZirkulation <Strömungsmechanik>Disk read-and-write headClient (computing)DivisorCache (computing)Lecture/Conference
Configuration managementStrategy gameWeb serviceCycle (graph theory)Computer fileFacebookVulnerability (computing)Physical systemConfiguration spaceDigital rights managementBitSoftware engineeringPerfect groupProfil (magazine)Virtual machineJava appletFunction (mathematics)Bit rateGrass (card game)Traffic reportingFunctional (mathematics)EmailState of matterSynchronizationLaptopBootingProcess (computing)Zoom lensSuite (music)Service (economics)Form (programming)Interactive televisionPoint (geometry)Projective planeCuboidMiniDiscBlock (periodic table)Forcing (mathematics)Logic gateDistribution (mathematics)Selectivity (electronic)MereologyUser interfaceRevision controlBoss CorporationComponent-based software engineeringCyberspaceSet (mathematics)MathematicsOpen sourceTelecommunicationProxy serverServer (computing)Client (computing)Mathematical singularitySoftware developerEnterprise architectureProduct (business)Disk read-and-write headFront and back endsElectronic mailing listSoftwareInstallation artView (database)Semiconductor memoryWeb 2.0Menu (computing)Insertion lossRollback (data management)MultilaterationAcoustic couplerReal numberPatch (Unix)Computer animationLecture/Conference
VideoconferencingInformationIntegrated development environmentDatabaseNichtlineares GleichungssystemLocal ringMedical imagingLimit (category theory)Moment (mathematics)CyberspaceWeightProjective planeWeb pageOnline helpStructural loadCloningWeb 2.0Disk read-and-write headCentralizer and normalizerWater vaporModal logicObject (grammar)Distribution (mathematics)Spectrum (functional analysis)Stress (mechanics)FacebookRevision controlServer (computing)Complex (psychology)Computer filePower (physics)Virtual realityAsynchronous Transfer ModeDigital rights managementPersonal digital assistantConfiguration spaceComponent-based software engineeringLogicMereologyProduct (business)Forcing (mathematics)SatelliteBitPhysical systemComputer hardwareConservation lawWeb browserSoftwareConfiguration managementPatch (Unix)Table (information)Virtual machineMathematicsArithmetic meanScripting languageWikiMetadataEmailElectronic mailing listEnterprise architectureRight angleCodeSoftware testingLecture/Conference
Configuration spaceComputer fileRevision controlConfiguration managementBitPhysical systemCyberspaceWeb pageTask (computing)Process (computing)MereologyDigital rights managementLecture/ConferenceComputer animation
Group actionDescriptive statisticsPhysical systemSystem administratorTask (computing)Single-precision floating-point formatVirtual machineProfil (magazine)SatelliteMoving averageFood energyDigital rights managementLatent heat1 (number)Water vaporFunctional (mathematics)Computer animationLecture/Conference
Profil (magazine)Physical systemBitMultilaterationDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Kernel (computing)VirtualizationType theoryVirtual realityComplex (psychology)Position operatorNetwork topologyVisualization (computer graphics)Computer animationLecture/Conference
Computer filePasswordExecution unitVirtual machineConfiguration spaceSet (mathematics)MereologyGraph coloringImage resolutionComputer configurationSelectivity (electronic)Default (computer science)CollisionProcess (computing)CASE <Informatik>LoginGroup actionRootMessage passingMultilaterationKernel (computing)Profil (magazine)BitComputer animationLecture/Conference
SoftwareServer (computing)Type theoryPartition (number theory)Physical systemComputer configurationProfil (magazine)Single-precision floating-point formatIP addressRange (statistics)Order (biology)Acoustic couplerSampling (statistics)Electronic mailing listWordForm (programming)Computer animation
BootingSign (mathematics)Key (cryptography)Functional (mathematics)SoftwareService (economics)Physical systemMoment (mathematics)Condition numberGroup actionSelectivity (electronic)Mobile appProfil (magazine)Computer animationLecture/Conference
Key (cryptography)Visualization (computer graphics)Type theoryNetwork topologyComputer animationLecture/Conference
Repository (publishing)Client (computing)Image registrationPhysical systemCyberspaceCuboidRootConfiguration spaceComputer fileProcess (computing)Computer animationLecture/Conference
Physical systemGroup actionComputer fileConfiguration spaceDigital rights managementFigurate numberLecture/ConferenceComputer animation
Computer fileText editorGroup actionContext awarenessPhysical systemScripting language1 (number)Parameter (computer programming)Moment (mathematics)IP addressMacro (computer science)Computer animationLecture/Conference
Revision controlRight angleComputer fileUtility softwareComponent-based software engineeringLine (geometry)MathematicsSoftwareCalculationOpen setKey (cryptography)Configuration spaceModal logicProfil (magazine)Computer animationLecture/Conference
Configuration spaceKey (cryptography)Physical systemComputer fileCASE <Informatik>Component-based software engineeringComputer animation
Component-based software engineeringScripting languageMereologySharewareComputer fileClient (computing)Moment (mathematics)State of matterProcess (computing)Proof theoryComputer animation
Configuration spaceSoftwareMereologyProfil (magazine)BootingBitScripting languageComputer animation
Order (biology)CodecFood energyScripting languageForm (programming)Product (business)CuboidConfiguration spaceMathematicsComputer fileComputerMeasurementMoment (mathematics)Group actionStructural loadNormal (geometry)Installation artPhysical systemProcess (computing)Sheaf (mathematics)Set (mathematics)Goodness of fitLatent heatMedical imagingBootingRoboticsFunctional (mathematics)Flow separationSimilarity (geometry)Digital rights managementUser interfaceComponent-based software engineeringSystem administratorTheoryMetric systemNegative numberComputer configurationBit rateIntegrated development environmentFront and back endsMultiplication signClient (computing)Revision controlSuite (music)Operator (mathematics)Web 2.0Scheduling (computing)Rollback (data management)INTEGRALArithmetic meanSoftwareSatelliteComputer hardwareHuman migrationComputer animationLecture/Conference
Computer animationLecture/Conference
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
This is distributions room number two. We're now going to have a talk on space walk, excuse me. From Marcus Mutter and Sandro Matiz. Am I pronouncing their names right? Both are Linux engineers from Zurich. And have been involved with the Fedora project. But this is going to...
These guys are going to talk about an application. Space walkers, here's an application.
Okay, can you hear me?
So my name is Marcus Mutter, as I've known before. I'm working for the ETA in Zurich. And we're currently actively working with space walk. And satellites as well. Space walk is a free and open source life cycle management tool for Linux distributions.
First of all, I want to give you modern technology.
Okay, just press space. That works always. So, we're going to talk about... I want to talk about space walk as mentioned before.
Space walk, what is space walk? Space walk is a community life cycle management tool. Some of you may already know what a life cycle management tool is. Some of you don't. I'm going to explain the complete life cycle management circle later. But before that, I want to show you what space walk is.
Space walk is upstream for a product from Red Hat. This product is called Red Hat Network Satellite Server. It's a commercial... It was a commercial closed product from Red Hat, which exists for quite a while. And it's established in quite a lot of enterprise environments.
Back in 2008, Red Hat decided to make this product open source tool. Red Hat has a strategy to make nearly all the parts there actively developed on open source. So, every one of us can benefit from this process.
So, since 2008, a new project has been started. This project is called Space Walk. So, you may wonder what it is. I may call it, it is one wing, two and more. Because you can handle all that task with that tool. So, let's take a look at the life cycle management process now.
Here you see a little graphic and it shows you how it works. First of all, it's a provisioning process. I'm going to explain it in detail later. The machine has to be provisioned. The machine has to be managed in form of configuration. In form of software.
And the machine has to be monitored. Because you want to know the health of your machines. Another task is to reprovision or to update existing systems. You know distributions with quite a short life cycle like Fedora is. And you want to find a way how to maintain these distributions. You have a few options.
One option is to use a configuration management tool like Puppet or something like that. Another option is to use plain kickstart files for deploying that. And I think the best option is to have an integrated tool to handle all that task. First of all, there was provisioning.
Provisioning in red hat words is kickstarting a system. Other distributions have other tools for processing these steps. It's called kickstarting and it's already adapted to, I guess it's even possible for a boot or something like that. We have a wizard to create these kickstart profiles.
I'm going to show you that later. In the backend we use Coppler for PXE optimization. What we want is to deploy a system straight out of the box. We want to have a ready-to-one system which is automatically integrated into the life cycle management tool and works with it fine.
Coppler also supports snippets. Snippets are parts within the kickstart file that can be rendered during kickstart process. These snippets can contain macros or things like that which may contain system information,
individual information which can be used later for things like monitoring. One of the components of Coppler is called Cheater. Okay, what's its name? Cheater is a verification tool. Verifies the integrity of your kickstart files. You can always upload kickstart files into the system.
You can point and click all the components that are available in the kickstart profiles. I'm going to show you that later. And Cheater verifies it for you. So you can really do nothing wrong. For the next part, what happens after the provisioning process?
One really important thing is that you want to manage the software on your machine. You want to deploy updates. It's called wet-headwords, ELATAs, in the form of updates and notification messages.
You want to manage a number of systems, not only one. You want to select a few systems. You want to group systems together and manage these on one single click. Or maybe even a shotgun. You can do all that with the software management component of this baseboard server. The software management component abstracts things like repositories to so-called channels.
Channels can be subscribed by system. So system can have access to the associated channels. And automatically install the software that is given in the kickstart profile or even later.
You can should do the software install. For example, on a hardware machine with about two or three clicks away. One nice feature that most of the components of SpaceBorg have is snapshot and rollback functionality. So if you do something wrong or a mistake happens.
Or even the system broke down during the provisioning or management process. You can repeat that, simply repeat that or roll it back. So you can always have a really defined state. This state is definitely reliable.
The next thing is, and it's the most contrast thing of this SpaceBorg server. The next thing is the configuration engine. I always discuss with people who prefer things like puppet or even CIF engine or other tools.
SpaceBorg has a different approach concerning configuration engine. It tries to keep things flat and simple. And this is the difference. It can't be the right tool for every case. In some cases puppet might be a better choice. But in most cases this is even more than enough.
The files are version controlled. So you can simply upload a new version of a configuration file. You can access the history of the file. You can create this via GUI via shell. And within the configuration files things like macros can also be used.
So for example you want to deploy a configuration file with the hostname set. Simply add within this configuration file the macro for hostname or p information. And it's automatically rendered during the deployment of the configuration file.
The next thing is what happens if you for example deploy a configuration file for your web server. Possibly you need to restart or reload gracefully the service.
You can do this with remote commands. Remote commands are handled with SpaceBorg in the backend called OSAT. OSAT uses at the moment Java for communication. There's a jump communication between the client, maybe a proxy which can be set in between.
And the SpaceBorg server. During this communication remote commands can be pushed to the client. And then executed. So you can simply execute a remote command after the config file deployment. That gracefully reloads your patch with that server.
One nice feature is send processing. So you can take one or two of your machines from your group. And try to deploy and change configuration files to these two machines. To see how they still behave. If they still behave like you have expected.
If so, you can move the files from the sandbox to the real world config management system. And apply it to the other boxes. It makes QA quite more easy. As in the software management, even configuration management supports snapshots and rollbacks.
So you can do nearly nothing wrong of course. And another component of the SpaceBorg server which we will be seeing later. Is the monitoring functionality.
Red Hat has bought a few years ago. Has bought a company which developed lockpills. Lockpills is a monitoring solution. Similar to solutions like Nagios or settings or something like that. It's not that powerful but it's quite okay. You can create probe suites.
And within these probe suites you can check the status of your system. You can create service state probes. You can create quad state probes. That you can simply monitor if your web server is still reachable through port 80 or 443 or something. You can also define system state probes.
Which will tell you for example the disk or memory usage of your system. This can be shown in graphical output. So it generates graphs, it generates reports. Which can be downloaded in CSV files or something like that.
It has an integrated routing functionality. Which supports email alerts. So you're always informed about the state of your systems. So the last part of this life cycle. May be reprovision.
It's not said that you have to reprovision a system. But what if a system has been hijacked? What if a system, one of a system has been compromised? And you now got the update that fixes the security hole. Which has been used for the compromise. You can easily redeploy the system with this new update which fixes the security hole.
To the predefined state where it was before. And there are other scenarios as mentioned before. You can update from one distribution release to another. For example we have Fedora release of 11.
And you want to upgrade it to release 12. But you want to keep your system history. You want to keep the package profiles in sync. You want to have the new system. Exactly the same package set installed. And you want to have the same configuration files.
You can simply reprovision this system to a new distribution state. As you can select kickstart files in which you want to improve. This process uses open source to collect code. It's part of the, it's really part of the Coupler project.
And it supports PXE and it supports BLAP for reprovisioning the system. As mentioned the initial process of provisioning the system is normally done via PXE. Or via Coupler Boot easily. The reprovisioning process does not need PXE anymore. It supports it but it does not need it.
It simply adds an entry to your grub menu. And boots into it if you want to. Then it starts the kickstart process. And selects a profile you have defined in the user interface. You can insert package profiles to your system.
So it behaves as before or you can sync your package profiles to different systems. So you want to make a system look like another one. You can simply sync these package profiles to keep them in state. Reprovisioning can be scheduled.
So you can set this evening or this night I want to reinstall all my machines at 10 o'clock. You can even move that. You can set 30 machines at 10 and 20 machines at 11 or so. One major aspect at least for QA and for ISO and things like that is keeping history.
So you know what has happened to your system. Everything, every step that has happened to your system is documented in the history. You can just browse it, view it and the new system is still associated. The reprovisioning system is still associated with its old history.
So you can always make what happened in the past. So last I want to tell you a bit about the project strategy before I show you how it looks like. Because if you see it you can imagine what I'm talking about.
As always it's weather project and similar to Fedora. It contains the latest and the greatest technology. There is a very short release cycle. You can expect new releases every three to six months. So if you want to work with spacewalk in the future you have to think about that.
Because you have to find a way how you manage your spacewalk system for itself. Because you want to update it too and you want to keep it in zoom. With this release, with this new release, new features I added. And maybe sometimes the strategy of the product may change a bit.
Of course there are plans to include func instead of ozark for remote commands and java. So maybe from one release to another you have to find an upgrade scenario that works for you.
The next thing is you won't get enterprise support at least from wet head. At least from what I know from now. Maybe in the future there are some small or even larger companies. Will give you enterprise SLAs for spacewalk too. So you don't have the enterprise support but you have the back end of the community.
Spacewalk has a very little and large community which grows from day to day. And you can use a mailing list or ESC channel to communicate. Who develops this product?
Wet head is still mainly responsible for the development of spacewalk. But we already had a few cool contributions from the community. And as it's open, everyone is invited to take part in the product and to approve it.
For example, at the moment it supports federal centers as well. In the future we are looking to support other distributions too. We have quite a workable support for SLAs because it's in satellite server. But we are looking for support for Debian. Some of the guys are still already working to support, to bring Debian support into spacewalk.
And other distributions are to come. So if you like the product and if you want to help to improve it to support your distribution. Because I know many of you don't abuse federal centers.
You are invited to help to improve it. The script and the infrastructure is already there. But one of the future plans is to support past rest while in the future. And that's the major leg spacewalk has at the moment. At the moment spacewalk only supports Oracle as database engine.
And as Oracle is a commercial project you have either to decide if you buy it or to use the free version of it. It's called Oracle XE but it's very limited. One of the limitations is that it has a four gigabyte database limit.
So at the moment spacewalk can either be used with a full featured Oracle database. Or you wait or you just want to take a look at the product. I would suggest you to take a look at it. Import things like centers because they don't take much space. And wait or help to get past records upon into it.
Otherwise you will get frustrated soon. Because a four gigabyte database will be bloated with two or three fedora releases. Then your spacewalk has begun. So what we want you to do. We want you, well where we are now first.
I want to tell you where we are now. We haven't worked in software patch management system. All the components are shown are already functional. They work correctly. And as the satellite server with spacewalk is upstream. It's already a reliable enterprise product.
These features are really pro. Some of them are new but they work in their code. It also supports some kind of software and hardware inventory. That's very basic at the moment. Hopefully that will be a part that will be extended.
And what I'm looking for is a bit more complex configuration management. At the moment remote commands can only be executed manually. At least what I was looking for. Is to associate remote commands to config file to join.
So you can bound remote commands to config file. It already supports KVM and XEN as guest systems. So you can easily provision in virtual environments too. And what can we do? Where, what has the community already done in the past years?
We have added in this e-Linux alting component. There are tools for wet head and water cloning. Dark who is sitting here has developed a tool called Unweepo. Which may be used to fetch packages from upstream if you want to deploy wet head.
So this works. We got tools for the water cloning. So you can fetch the waters from wet head. Or you can even import the centers audit mails to generate the waters for centers.
We got nice mailing list in the history as mentioned before. And we got great documentation. The documentation is held on the project page of Fedora. It's easily, easy to edit it. As it's in wiki you only need a fast account to access it.
Okay. I'm going to hold on here. And maybe you always have some questions. Otherwise we're going to show you how it looks like. Please. You said that we put the whole distribution in the database? Yep. Why not the whole distribution?
Not the packages. The packages not. But the meta information of the packages. And it loads so fast. As we got how many packages do we have in Fedora now? 16,000 packages. And the meta information of these packages blows the database.
We got environments with a database size of 30 gigabytes. Yep. How does it cope with local configuration changes? Can you integrate them into your environment?
Do you mean configuration file management or? Local configuration changes. Yeah, you can define files as locally managed or centralized managed. So, if you define a file as locally managed, it is simply pulled from the machine and integrated in the configuration management.
You can override it, but the locally managed files always got the higher rights. You can combine it with centrally managed files. So you can't run a mixed configuration. You can mix it. Or does it integrate your local changes too?
For example, you provisioned a test configuration and you have to decide where to go. And that's one of the aspects of centralized management. Because what I want, I want no more local changes on my machines. If so, I want to define these files to be locally managed.
Otherwise, I do not need a centrally managed system. I don't want to go to the PC and fix it there. Only if there's no other way as the hardware is broken or something like that. Okay. Are there any other questions?
Is there any provisioning to integrate the solution from external CMBB solution? That means configuration management violates. You know, in the enterprise world, there are a lot of solutions which already provide configuration management violates.
I don't know if it's possible that the kind of steps. I don't think so. At least, it's as well a fact that Facebook acts itself as a CMBB. Yeah, that's true. Okay, you want to combine it with another configuration.
And you can leave that component alone if you want to, of course. And simply use the other configuration management file for your configuration management. But it's not possible to plug in the configuration. That would be a really cool feature for the...
That's possible. You can export the configuration, at least the configuration files, and put in some version to your configuration. You can also import it from another configuration management tool. That's possible. And it already works. Okay, we got quite a long evolution here.
So hopefully we will see a bit of the system. So this is how space work looks if you log in. Here you see your overview page. It is customizable. You can plug in your management tasks you want to see here. What we want to show you now is how you should set up
or how you should go ahead and start the deployment process. First of all, I want to show you how to create an easily part. For example, how to create a system tool. So I'm going to show it here. You select the system task, create a new group.
Grouping is very important to manage your systems. So you have to think first before you act, as always. And also mostly. So here you can only give a group name and a group description.
You can associate this group with system administrators. One of the cool features of spacewalk or even satellite service is that it's multi-organizational capable. So you can create multiple orgs within one installation. And allow users to share these channels between these orgs.
This was one of the aspects which was very important in our scenario is because we got many different departments which want to have their own infrastructures. You can go ahead and access what's in the group, but we don't show it here. To allow the single system administrator to only manage machines within this specific group.
Next step, I want to show you a kickstart profile. Within the kickstart profile, you can create a new kickstart profile
for which you can provision your system. First of all, you give it a label. Say what is the base channel. I have imported different channels before. I'll show you more a bit later. You select the kickstart of the tree, which is the kernel and the inner body, which should be loaded via pixie.
And you could also select a virtualization type if you are provisioning a virtualized environment. That's the first step of the quite complex kickstart wizard. You can give a root pass for here. A while later.
Now we are creating a new kickstart profile for the fastest machine. So here you see kickstart profile details. At least a part of it.
So the resolution is 600. 600. Here you see the settings we have predefined for. You can add some actions. First of all, you have to activate it for its defaults. You can log custom post script.
So you want to monitor your provisioning process. This could be very helpful. You can preserve the KS file, the configuration file, the kickstart file itself. You can define organizational unit settings and kernel options. Maybe we can scroll up a bit. And take a look, for example, at the advanced options tab.
Within the advanced options you can define nearly every aspect that is available within a kickstart file. You can define a network type. You can define your kickstart form. You can define partition layout.
And so on and so on. If you know how to kickstart a well or centers of even Fidora system. You know which options could be set here. They are documented well, of course. Then within the bare metal kickstart tab you can preselect IP ranges.
That should be rooted automatically into these kickstart profiles. You can add single IP addresses or ranges. In order to do that you have to set up a DHCP server that
the PXE server, the integrated coupler PXE server as next server so it will move forward. Scroll up a bit please. OK, maybe we could take a look at the software tab.
You can define predefined packages which should be installed on the newly created system. At the moment we have a bare package selection. As you know, if you are familiar with kickstart definitions, you can define groups, package groups which are available with the app side.
You can add single packages. You can exclude packages with a minus sign. Everything you can do with a kickstart can be done here too. One of the important aspects is that a kickstart profile has to be associated with activation keys.
This is more historically because Red Hat uses these activation keys for licensing. Here it has some different functions so we can take a look at the activation keys tab now and generate a new one.
Simply give it a name. The key is automatically generated when you don't type anything. You can select the base channel and you can select the add-on title. This is important if you want to use things like monotone visualization.
Now you can see the details of this newly created activation key. This activation key is associated to child channels and channels. As you have seen before, the kickstartable tree only allows you to define a base channel for the kickstart.
If you want to access these additional repositories, as we have added RPMFusion, as we have added the TUSE repository, which contains the necessary tools that have to be installed on the client, you can select them here.
You can also select packages that have to be installed after registration of the system to the space box. Within the configuration tab, you can associate a configuration channel from which files should be deployed during the kickstart process.
You can click groups here. You can now join, you can let the system automatically join the previously generated group. So, if you kickstart this system, this will also directly appear within the group and you can manage it from there afterwards.
Maybe we can take a look at the configuration file management. As always, you have to create a channel. The name is used in common places.
We create an example configuration channel now. This configuration channel can now contain files. We can either edit a file directly within this editor or we can simply upload a file.
Maybe you can just let us make a simple file. You can define the user group context and you also can define a DSLRX context here, which may be very important if you activate XAMX on your systems.
As you can see here, micros could be used. Micros are started with a delimiter and added, which can be predefined here. You can take a look at the reference, which macros are supported at the moment. There are a lot of macros. You can use macros for host names, IP address as mentioned,
and add custom keychains to that. Yeah, we only got one revision right now. Maybe you can create a new revision of this file. You can still either upload it or edit it here. Could you please create a new revision?
So we want to know which bar we are going to add. And now we can change the file. We can div it here from the GUI. We can also use command line utilities to do that.
And now we can use a comparison. As you can see, it finds the line which has changed. And we can easily reword changes if necessary. This newly created configuration channel could be associated with the kickstart profile as a software channel before.
Maybe we, with the activation key, maybe we can just switch back to the activation key, open the activation key that we have created, and associate this configuration channel to this activation key. What does that mean?
If you activate, the configuration file should be deployed to a kickstart process. The kickstart system already contains the packages used to be preselected, and it already contains the configuration files which are within this channel. So what you get is a completely configured system within one step.
I personally don't know many other systems that can do things like that. Okay. What can we show more? Are there some components you want to see?
We are quite limited as we can a kickstart demo client at the moment.
Yeah, kickstart files can contain scripts, pre-scripts, which will be executed in a defined state of the kickstart process, and these scripts can also be added here. These scripts can include snippets.
This is part of Coppler, as Coppler got a quite mighty snippet engine. We have some pre-defined snippets here. Maybe we can just open a snippet to take a look at it. Maybe a snippet from network configuration. So you can see a snippet which contains something like a script that does something.
We can pre-define these snippets and easily reuse them in different kickstart profiles. So once the work is done, it's done for all the kickstart profiles, as we can create common scripts that can be reused.
You can either use these scripts that are pre-defined, or you can define your own snippets in order to use them in SCCA. A snippet can easily be added into a script in form of a syntax. Here you can see it. This calls the snippet, which we have seen before,
within a PostScript, for example. You have to activate the templating engine in order to make it happen.
Do you mean reconfigure in form of change of setting? You can, what you do is you create system groups. You have several similar systems. You can either select the system for itself, simply put the system into the system set manager,
and manage it from there. Here's a system set manager where you don't have really just a system here, so we can show it right now. But you can simply select one single system, manage it with the system set manager, or you can manage a group of systems, and for example, one of the load command,
or deploy configuration files, deploy a lot of updates, schedule normal package installations, schedule updates or something like that.
It will be tracked in the history of the system. Nearly every change that has been initialized from the group will be tracked in the history. So you can see if a system is provisioned successfully, what happens during the provisioning process, you can see a config file deployment was successful,
and you can monitor it using the monitoring suite or something. Okay, do you have any more questions?
That's quite hard. What you can do is you can reduce the client to the system. You can reduce it and afterwards manage it within the system.
What you can also do, you can create a similar kickstart file with a kickstart wizard, and if you want to reinstall it or reprovision the system, you can use this kickstart file to reinstall or reprovision. And then you got a new system. We already got this within our migration scenario.
We already had a few systems that we have to register. It already has been installed because we got a working environment. And we simply register them there. I'm glad the admins create their kickstart file.
But don't ask me about that. I don't know nothing. We have deactivated it. I personally do not use Solaris. But it has basic Solaris support, and you will find some documentation on that in the wiki, I guess.
What is used for monitoring? Yeah, as mentioned before, LockPuls is used for monitoring. LockPuls was a proprietary tool from a firm called LockPuls, and it has been integrated into a system quite years ago. It has been integrated in satellites.
What some of the engineers are thinking about is to switch to a more common tool. For example, manias or something like that. But that is one of the main cool aspects of this product, because it doesn't matter which conflict management tool is used in the backend. If they implement manias, for example, the user interface,
I guess it will still look the same. Maybe some more options will come. But you will feel familiar with the user interface. That is very important for a normal administrator.
Okay, one last question. How about hardware preconfiguration? For example, we usually get systems which are just named, where we have to configure rate or change file settings. Currently, we just boot a specific image with scripts on it,
which just do that, and then we do the normal provisioning. I would do it simply the same way. I would add a single customized image, which are boot over PC, and let it do the script, and afterwards, I would provision it. So, isn't it...
No, the snapshot and rollback functionality works on the software and configuration tool management section. You can rollback software changes and configuration tools.
That's very important. Okay, one last question. Is there any nice integration to the operation detection? So you can say, I just... Please show me all configuration tools of the action package, and I want to edit those in the web interface?
Or is it just, okay, I'm going to push EPC... It's simply in play. It's simply in play. The configuration measure is something that definitely could be extended next to it. But at the moment, it's quite simple.
Okay, I think we're finished now. Thanks for listening.