[Spacewalk-list] server hw dimensioning and usage questions

[Jan Hutař]

On Wed, 22 Aug 2012 11:33:53 +0200 "Mgr. Peter Hudec"
<peter.hudec at cnc.sk> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> few last week I'm playing with this system to fid out, if it's
> suitable for our purposes. There are several question, that I
> have, please help me to answer then.
> 
> First, the purpose of usage
> HW:	1000x notebooks
> SW:	Debian/Ubuntu based
> 
> I'm able to install ported packages and register the client
> correctly with small patches. Manage the repositories,
> add/remove packages etc ...
> 
> 1) hw dimensioninig
> The testing instance is running on server /KVM virtual/
> 	RAM:	4GB
> 	CPU:	1x2.4GHz
> 	HDD:	20GB
> I run small script, that run 1000x registration so see how it
> will look like. The server is from time to time unresponsive,
> is this normal ? Cca 10% of the registration failed due the
> server problem ;( Could you please recommend the final HW
> spec ?
> --- cut /script/ ---
> for ID in `seq -w 0 999`; do
> 	echo -n "SystemID: ${ID}"
> 	echo "HOSTNAME=fo-VirtualBox-${ID}.hudecof"
> > /etc/sysconfig/network rhnreg_ks
> > --activationkey=1-b22aba199b5543c81d68387aa2d09baf
> > --force	
> 	echo " ."
> done
> --- cut ---

Hello,
this is strange and should not happen. Could you investigate
logs (/var/log/httpd/error.log
and /var/log/tomcat*/catalina.out) on the server side for these
failures?

> 2) system hw info history
> As the clients will be notebooks, the HDD replacement /form
> bad HW to new/ could occur. The "Schedule Hardware Refresh"
> will clean all information from the DB and insert new one. Is
> there any way how to store the history of the HW without
> patching the system?

No, I do not know about any. You can either try
`spacewalk-report inventory` if it contains info you need and
store these reports regularly. Or HW info can be obtained using
API call like system.getDevices() and keep these info as well.

> The main purpose of this is the battery information. I did
> small patch push within th HW also battery information. I will
> provide patch against spacewalk-1.7 to developer mailing list
> after final testing. Do not know if it will be accepted.
> 
> 
> 3) system name change
> During the registration, the hostname is used as system name.
> If the hostname is changed, i there any way how to
> automatically reflect this in spacewalk?

No as the profile name string is just a static name of the
system, like "Mike's notebook". You can use API or WebUI to
manage it. 

> 4) spacewalk monitoring function
> Could anyone explain me this function and if it works on
> debian based clients? I need to get upon request the disk
> space usage of the notebook. As the notebooks are mobile, the
> ip address is not fixed, so there is very hard to use
> monitoring system.

I do not know scope of Debina clients support (-> slukasik or
msuchy), but I guess monitoring is not supported.

Generally using monitoring you can record status of the client
system and its services (load, is httpd running?, ping
response...) and generate graphs and send alert mails based on
some criteria.

> 5) client side certificates
> as the clients are mobile do the spacewalk have possibility to
> verify the connection based on client ssl certificate? I did
> not found any configuration directive on 'rhnsd' or 'osad'.

Not sure what you mean here - which client side certificates?
rhn_check uses config in /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date - there you
should have serverURL=https://... Services 'rhnsd' and 'osad'
uses rhn_check to actually get and perform the action.

> 	best regards
> 		Peter Hudec

Regards,
Jan



-- 
Jan Hutar     Systems Management QA
jhutar at redhat.com     Red Hat, Inc.
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