Sometimes it is necessary to break down the patch status of the Linux landscape.

Especially if the administrator's work is subjected to security standards a constant documentation of maintenance tasks is often necessary.

Using Spacewalk, Red Hat Satellite or SUSE Manager available patches are described as errata. Those …

Recently I finished my first ArchLinux installation since 2010. Many things have change since I used the distro the last time and I felt a little bit helpless first.

The former ArchLinux installer isn't used anymore - the experienced Linux user has to prepare the hard drives for the installation on his own. The …

Recently I had a issue when trying to use the OSA dispatcher integrated in Spacewalk, Red Hat Satellite and SUSE Manager. The software was unable to push actions to registered client systems - it seems that there was a problem with the appropriate service:

1# service jabberd status
2router dead but subsys locked
3sm …

Recently I stumped upon the following error while creating GPG keys for signing self-created RPM packages :

1can't connect to `/home/su-rpmdev/.gnupg/S.gpg-agent': No such file or directory
2gpg-agent[14392]: command get_passphrase failed: Operation cancelled
3gpg: cancelled by user
4gpg: Key generation …

Virtualized Linux guests running on VMware vSphere can only offer the best performance if the helper software VMware Tools in the most recent version.

If you have ever used VMware products you know that constant updates guarantee the support of new operating systems and hardware. But this has also the disadvantage that …

Some system updates (e.g. kernel updates) require the affected Linux system to be rebooted. If the system is managed using Spacewalk, Red Hat Satellite or SUSE Manager this reboot can be scheduled after patching the host very comfortably.

However it is possible that after the reboot (watch the output of the uptime …

If you're running a PostgreSQL database on a CentOS/RHEL system and moved the data directory to a dedicated partition the following error might occur if you want to monitor the filling level using the Nagios/Icinga plugin check_disk:

1DISK CRITICAL - /var/lib/pgsql/data is not accessible: Permission denied

The reason …

After some time old packages are accumulated in software channels managed by Spacewalk, Red Hat Satellite or SUSE Manager.

Especially at least when your hard drive are threaten to get tanked up you should clean up and remove unneeded packages. For this there is a utility called spacewalk-data-fsck - but this tool only …