Spacewalk and already installed outstanding patches

calendar Jun 8, 2020 · 2 min read · spacewalk suse-manager  ·
Share on: linkedin copy

Sometimes Spacewalk still suggests updates and errata for a system even though they have already been installed. Especially for bigger system landscapes this is confusing as planning maintenance using the web interface is hard in this way.

1# zypper update scout
2Refreshing service 'spacewalk'.
3Loading repository data...
4Reading installed packages...
5No update candidate for 'scout-0.1.1+20180103.0595254-6.1.noarch'. The highest available version is already installed.
6Resolving package dependencies...
7
8Nothing to do.

Often, the solution for this problem is kinda easy. Within Spacewalk, there is a service called taskomatic being reponsible for executing internal tasks; the appropriate tasks are defined by time in bunches. Usually, Spacewalk systems are configured in a way that the download new software content (updates, errata) every night - sometimes the task for updating repository metadata (channel-repodata-default bunch) simply freezes. In this case, restarting the task scheduler and checking the log might do the trick:

1# systemctl restart taskomatic
2# tail -f /var/log/rhn/rhn_taskomatic_daemon.log
3...
4INFO | jvm 1 | ... [Thread-124] INFO com.redhat.rhn.taskomatic.task.repomd.RepositoryWriter - File Modified Date:2018-01-24 20:57:35 CET
5INFO | jvm 1 | ... [Thread-124] INFO com.redhat.rhn.taskomatic.task.repomd.RepositoryWriter - Channel Modified Date:2018-01-25 23:30:10 CET
6INFO | jvm 1 | ... [Thread-124] INFO com.redhat.rhn.taskomatic.task.repomd.RepositoryWriter - Generating new repository metadata for channel 'icinga2'(sha256) 1119 packages, 0 errata
7INFO | jvm 1 | ... [Thread-124] INFO com.redhat.rhn.taskomatic.task.repomd.RepositoryWriter - Repository metadata generation for 'icinga2' finished in 9 seconds

Afterwards, web interface information should be back in sync again:

System managed with Spacewalk and outstanding patches

In addition the client add-on which retrieves packages via Spacewalk sometimes crashes when updating the software profile information (installed packages and versions). This information is being updated in periodic intervals - to immediately update this information run the following command:

1# rhn-profile-sync -v
2Updating package profile...
3Updating hardware profile...

Translations: