[Spacewalk-list] Clone channel management for monthly patching

[Matthew Madey]

You can accomplish this via the spacewalk-clone-by-date command. I do a
similar thing for monthly patching, but I clone all the erratas up to a
specific date into my patching channel. For what you are trying to do, I
would have your CentOS 6 Updates channel updated daily, and use
spacewalk-clone-by-date to create the new channels. You can specify a date
range

-d YYYY-MM-DD, --to_date=YYYY-MM-DD
              All errata on or before the specified date will be cloned if
it does not already exist in the destination channel(s). If this option is
omitted no errata will be cloned.

However, I'd recommend that you don't create new channels for each month
unless you have a very specific reason to do so.. because as you mentioned,
you'll have to subscribe systems to the new channels every time you want to
patch. This makes channel management harder than it needs to be.

For every channel, the model I use is this:

Baseline channel - Updated daily, no systems subscribed.

Datacenter channel - Refreshed once a month using spacewalk-clone-by-date,
all datacenter systems subscribed.



To automate this, I use a channel mapping configuration file, which lays
out the source and destination channels


Example:

       "channels":
        {
                "rhel-x86_64-server-6-base":
"rhel-x86_64-server-6-datacenter",
                "rhel-x86_64-server-6-base-common":
"rhel-x86_64-server-6-datacenter-common",
                "rhel-x86_64-server-6-base-epel":
"rhel-x86_64-server-6-datacenter-epel",
         }





On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 3:06 PM, Sam Sen <ssen at ariasystems.com> wrote:

>   I know there isn’t a perfect way to handle this but here’s what I’m
> trying to accomplish.
>
>  I would like to freeze a channel each month in order to patch our group
> of hosts. I have a parent channel, let’s call it “CentOS 6 Updates.” At the
> end of each month, I would like to clone this channel and call the new
> channel “CentOS 6 2015-Jan.” At the start of this, it should be pretty
> easy. However, how do I go about creating the February channel? If I clone
> from the original channel “CentOS 6 Updates,” wouldn’t it also have erratas
> for Jan? I don’t want the January erratas because they should’ve been
> applied earlier.
>
>  Also, I suppose I’ll need to script this along with the part of
> modifying the channel association for my machines to point to “CentOS 6
> 2015-Feb” after each new clone channel is created.
>
>
>
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