[Spacewalk-list] Looking for "Best Practice" for patching base-os of Spacewalk Servers

[Michael Mraka]

WHITNEY_LATTA at homedepot.com wrote:
% Hello,
% 
% We are trying to design and deploy a highly available solution using 2 Spacewalk instances in a hot-standby configuration, comprised of:
...
% QUESTION:  For patching the Spacewalk servers themselves (Base-OS only, and only the RHSA patches... at this time), what is recommended, or established as a "Best-Practice" for keeping the Spacewalk servers themselves current and synched with the rest of the enterprise?
% 
% I have my own thoughts on this, but have received other suggestions from the tech team assigned to this... I'd really appreciate any and all comments and recommendations. I searched but couldn't find documentation that covers this explicitly.. it seems very straightforward, but no consensus is coming forth from internal brainstorming discussions.
% 
% As I see it, we have these options:
% 
% 1) Register each of the 2 Spacewalk servers to Spacewalk... making each one a "yum client" of the other... subscribe them to the current monthly "static" cloned channel containing the errata.  (NOTE: OSAD client daemon will NOT be installed on the Spacewalk servers)
% 
% Schedule a maintenance window and use yum to patch the "standby" server (Spacewalk services are shut-down), installing the os security errata.
% 
% Shutdown Spacewalk services on the primary, and bring them up on the (now-patched) standby Spacewalk server.
% 
% (After validation and acceptance testing is complete) Repeat the above procedure to patch the primary server.

Yes, registering underlying OS to Spacewalk server itself is very common
solution. So the setup above should work fine.


Regards,

--
Michael Mráka
Satellite Engineering, Red Hat