[Spacewalk-list] Can spacewalk be used on a disconnected network?

[Michael Mraka]

Paul Greene:
> Hi All,
> 
> I have a requirement to manage a bunch of CentOS servers that are all
> disconnected from the internet. These are the kinds of things I'm looking
> to accomplish:
> 
> yum updates and security patches, preferably for multiple version #s of
> CentOS 6.7, 6.8, 6.9, and 7.x
> rapid deployment of new servers, preferably with predefined security
> configurations; currently, the systems are primarily physical,
> virtualization might come later
> sometimes the "rapid deployment of servers" might include blowing away what
> is currently on an existing server and reinstalling a fresh system
> 
> For the building of the spacewalk server itself, how complicated is it to
> build the server itself offline - i.e. resolving all the dependencies and
> populating with all the needed rpms? (It might be possible to build the
> server connected to the internet initially, and then move it offline)
> 
> Is spacewalk a good tool to meet these requirements?

Hi Paul, 

This is fairly common use of Spacewalk server. 

I'd actually recommend you to set up 2 Spacewalk servers - online master
and offline slave - then you can easily sync CentOS repositories to
master, export them to USB stick and carry them over to offline slave
and import. Also if you want to install the slave offline just record
rpms installed on master (rpm -qa) and copy them to offline slave for
installation. And you can then even register offline slave to the
Spacewalk server running on it so it will update its rpms from itself.

> Paul

Register,

--
Michael Mráka
System Management Engineering, Red Hat