You can accomplish all of those things with spacewalk. To best perform it, you'll probably want to utilize a channel clone process to lock in patches at a particular level vs always updating to the latest. It will help keep new patches from being included when performing DEV -> QA -> PRD patching cycles.
When we patch, our groups contain a mix of architectures and versions (RHEL4/5/6,CentOS5/6) and they patch successfully. When you are creating the task, you have to select the appropriate channels for each differing system in the group, but it can be scheduled immediately from one screen. You can push immediately with spacewalk using OSAD, which is basically a jabber client for rhn_check :-) Your other route is as you suspected, write a script that executes rhn_check. I've had great success using OSAD, and I appreciate not having to wait up to 4 hours for my systems to check in. I also recommend use of spacecmd as getting the list of packages and errata are quite simple vs the web interface. Thanks! From: thepenguin whisperer <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Reply-To: spacewalk-list <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Date: Friday, May 17, 2013 8:03 AM To: spacewalk-list <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Subject: Re: [Spacewalk-list] Patch management using spacewalk Hi all, I'm looking into doing patch management for 100+ RHEL servers. I briefly looked into spacewalk and thought that I might accomplish what I want with this project. What I want: - Groups of servers - see all patches that can be installed on a group - able to select the patches I want deployed on the group in a "patch-set" - being able to later on apply this patchset to another group Can I mix different architectures(x86 and x86_64) and versions(RHEL 5 and 6) in one group and will this work with updating packages in the before mentioned process? I created a software channel and selected RHEL5... as base channel. However it seems that I only can upload my own rpms to such channels. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the purpose of this custom software channel. I thought I might be able to create a set of patches this way. I noticed that you actually can't push immediately. Or am I wrong? (I have been fiddling with RHN) Or I can execute a script that has rhn_check in it? Note that I might use names that are used in rhn but might be called different in spacewalk. Thanks in advance for any help! Kind regards
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