It is possible that the following error message is displayed on client systems when software packages are distributed using Spacewalk, Red Hat Satellite or SUSE Manager: 1Error while executing packages action: empty transaction [[6]] This issue rests on the database of the management suite. After a while (or after a …

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If you're maintaining your system landscape with Spacewalk, Red Hat Satellite or SUSE Manager you might also see many old entries while having a look in the action list after a while: Every task triggered using the web interface is registered as action - after a while this list is growing rapidly. I'm not very familiar …

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A couple of days ago I spent a lot of time with Kickstart under Spacewalk and Red Hat Satellite and was looking for a possibility for creating Kickstart Trees for CentOS comfortably. Radomly I stumbled upon a blog article which served a useful script. That inspired me to create a more handy python script for that. …

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There are several OpenJDK versions for running Java applications under Enterprise Linux. This is adequate for the most applications but in some cases you might need the proprietary version by Oracle (e.g. because of support matrices of commercial third-party software). On the JRE webseite you can find tarball and RPM …

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During a recent system update that I started using Spacewalk I stumbled upon the following error message: 1Fatal error in Python code occurred [[6]] After some troubleshooting I came up that I upgraded my spacewalk server to the most recenet release a couple of days ago. During this update I forgot to update also the …

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A couple of days ago I stumbled upon a blog article by Duncan Mac-Vicar - it was all about a very interesting concept to modernize the web interface of Spacewalk. With great interest I have taken note of that a combination of defacto standards like Twitter Bootstrap, jQuery and HTML5 was used to pretty up the frumpy …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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