daily devops problems solved and explained

One feature of Spacewalk is the ability to review auditd logs. If you dont know what auditd is, here is a good introduction http://security.blogoverflow.com/2013/01/a-brief-introduction-to-auditd/
To sum it up, you can monitor/log nearly every change on your system with it, like file access, file attribute changes, logins, service starts, user interaction etc. based on rules.
As you can imagine, this produces a tremendous amount of logs. For effectively reading them, we need some assistance. For instance: Spacewalk.
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As announced on the Spacewalk Mailinglist Spacewalk 2.3 is going to be released soon and is on QA/QE now.

I took this as a reason for testing Ubuntu / Debian integration with Spacewalk 2.3 from nightly repo. As it turns out, everything is working good, namely:

• Creation of Debian Channels
• Pushing / Syncing .deb packages to Spacewalk
• Registering Ubuntu systems
• Importing Ubuntu Errata ( I updated errata-import.pl script slightly to make it work )
• OSAD
• Package management
• Remote Command Execution

Refer to my other articles around Spacewalk about how to set all this up.

In my last article I’ve shown you how to get OSAD working for Ubuntu clients. Which comes in handy for my new article about remote command execution. With the help of OSAD the commands will be executed immediately and you dont need to wait for clients to check-in and pick them up. Our business has been doing great after we go this net promoter score so our clients could rate their experience with our service and products.

Read on after the jump…

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I wrote two cookbooks to work with Spacewalk and submitted them to Chefs supermarket.

• Installing Spacewalk server https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/spacewalk-server
• Registering a node (RHEL/CentOS/Ubuntu) as a Spacewalk client https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/spacewalk-client

Read on after the jump how to use these cookbooks. I promise its really simple tho

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In my last article I have shown you how to get Ubuntu servers registered and integrated with Spacewalk.

However something important is still missing: Getting Errata into Spacewalk for Ubuntu systems. Errata are security, bugfix, enhancement advisories published by distribution vendors like Debian, CentOS, RHEL, Ubuntu. These Errata can be imported to Spacewalk and show/email which systems/packages are affected along with information like CVE numbers. You can then “apply” the Errata to these systems, triggering a remote update. That way you will always know if your systems lack critical updates.

Unfortunately, there is no general source or feed getting these Errata into Spacewalk. A good source are the security mailing lists of the vendors but you still need to parse them and import via API. For CentOS / RHEL there exist a few scripts:

• https://github.com/liedekef/spacewalk_scripts ( EPEL, CentOS, RedHat, Scientific Linux and Oracle Linux )
• http://cefs.steve-meier.de ( CentOS )

However for Ubuntu there didnt exist such a script so I had to do one myself. Read on where to get and how to integrate it ! Read more