[Spacewalk-list] Recreating/Syncing cloned channels

[Ward, Pierce]

Hello list,

I'm looking for some feedback on my implementation of spacewalk (1.6) to try and improve how we manage it. As of now, our Production servers have no internet access, so we need to manage them with a spacewalk server. Additionally, we are required to keep our RHEL servers at a certain point release (e.g. 5.7), but we have a child channel which might include important security fixes (e.g. apache) that are tested individually.

In spacewalk I have a main channel, 'rhel-x86_64-server-5'. This channel has the RHEL 5.x ISO packages uploaded to it when we are moving to a newer point release. When they are uploaded we create new channels at that point release (e.g. rhel-x86_64-server-5.6/5.7 using spacewalk-create-channel). There is a child channel 'updates' in the main 'rhel-x86_64-server-5' channel that is synced with an mrepo repository containing all the latest 5.x updates (and errata is cloned using rhn-clone-errata.py). The spacewalk server is a member of the 'rhel-x86_64-server-5' channel, and therefore also the child 'updates' channel so we can get notified for relevant errata on that server.

However, since it is the servers managed by spacewalk that are most important to us, I want to also be able to see available errata for the servers that are members of the point release channels (e.g. members of 'rhel-x86_64-server-5.6'). Currently, I would manually delete the cloned child channel 'updates' (and unsubscribe the systems), then clone it again and the errata and manually re-subscribe the systems. This works, but it is a bit of a annoyance, and has to be done manually.

Is there any way I could do this via scripting (e.g. as part of my cron that syncs mrepo/clones errata etc.)? I've googled for some suggestions but can't seem to find anything beyond working directly with the spacewalk API, so I'm hoping someone else may have done something similar in the past or there are tools already for this purpose before I spend some time learning the API. Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Pierce

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