[Spacewalk-list] Moving child channels between parent channels

[James Hogarth]

On 14 May 2010 12:33, David Nutter <davidn at bioss.sari.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 12:06:13PM +0100, James Hogarth wrote:
>
>> Hmm I was hoping to avoid redoing my activation keys, kickstarts and
>> system subscriptions (after all with a clone the channel ID will
>> change) by just moving them....
>
> Yeah, it is slightly annoying. We tend to move our systems piecemeal
> between releases over the course of a week or two so distributions
> necessarily coexist for a period. It also means we don't experience
> the pain of changing loads of systems subscriptions at once, just one
> or two a day which is easily accomplished through system set manager.
>
> We don't use cobbler for install so amending kickstarts is not
> required in our case[1] and we only have 3 activation keys so that's
> simple to deal with too.
>
>> I can knock out something for the API perhaps and submit it but I was
>> hoping Jan or Mirov would have some insight on how easy this would be
>> or if it would bring a mountain of horribleness down on my head....
>>
>> My base channel and update channel for centos of centos_5.4 and
>> centos_5.4_update I'm regretting now as I could have just emptied it
>> of packages and resync'd them to the new paths upstream.... but it
>> looks like changing a channel label would be worse than changing the
>> parent channel ID in the database so far as potential corruptions and
>> where they are used...
>
> Can't help with that I'm afraid!
>
> Regards,
>
> [1] Our external kickstarts reference yum repositories which track the
> latest release anyway.
>
> --
> David Nutter                            Tel: +44 (0)131 650 4888
> BioSS, JCMB, King's Buildings, Mayfield Rd, EH9 3JZ. Scotland, UK
>
> Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland (BioSS) is formally part of The
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> No. SC006662
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Well I don't have time to do something risky this time round (or the
requisite testing environment). I'll do what you suggest fo rnow -
create my new base channel and updates channel and sync them. Then
clone the current child channels to them... Then knock out a simple
script using the API to move all the systems over as required. After
that delete the old channel... rename the cloned ones to the old
channel names (labels will have to change obviously but that's not too
much of a problem) and so on.

Won't be too bad - 74 systems reporting in... figure it'll take a day
of tedious work to carry out and another to verify all okay.

I'll just have to put some better automation in and so on (and maybe
test changing base channel or submit an API to do that) for 5.6 in
advance ;)

James