Configuring Spacewalk Client Revision as of Wednesday, 26 June 2024 at 10:57 UTC

Pre-Flight

Preparing the Client for Registration

Install the necessary packages

On CentOS 5

rpm -Uvh http://spacewalk.redhat.com/yum/1.3/RHEL/5/i386/spacewalk-client-repo-1.3-1.el5.noarch.rpm  
yum install rhn-client-tools rhn-check rhn-setup rhnsd m2crypto yum-rhn-plugin

Install the Spacewalk server certificate

You’ll find the Spacewalk server certificate in the /pub folder:

rpm -Uvh http://spacewalk.example.com/pub/rhn-org-trusted-ssl-cert-1.0-1.noarch.rpm

This installs the certificate file (RHN-ORG-TRUSTED-SSL-CERT) in /usr/share/rhn

Edit /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date

I only changed the values of serverURL and sslCACert:

sslCACert=/usr/share/rhn/RHN-ORG-TRUSTED-SSL-CERT
serverURL=https://spacewalk.example.com/XMLRPC

Install EPEL

You’ll get GPG key signing errors (like “Public key for blah is not
installed”) otherwise:

rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

Register the client to the Spacewalk server

Make sure you have two things:

  1. A properly configured /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date file
  2. The correct activation key

Then issue:

rhnreg_ks --activationkey=1-d31a1b9465e576d5250de5da356b00a0

Setting up Provisioning

Install these packages:

yum -y install rhncfg rhncfg-actions rhncfg-client osad

Enable the provisioning action on the client:

rhn-actions-control --enable-all

Read the man page for more fine-tuning. Now make sure that osad and
rhnsd are running:

service osad start  
chkconfig --level 345 osad on  
service rhnsd start  
chkconfig --level 345 rhnsd on

You should be all set now.

Setting up Monitoring

Install the rhnmd package and make sure it’s running:

yum -y install rhnmd  
service rhnmd start  
chkconfig --level 345 rhnmd on

Make sure that the client firewall allows connections from port 4545
(default).

Installing this package creates a new user called nocpulse, whose
homedir is /var/lib/nocpulse. Now ask for the nocpulse-identity
public key from the server and put it in
/var/lib/nocpulse/.ssh/authorized_keys. Provided you’ve set up the
server properly, you should be all set now.

Errors and Miscellanea

“Local permission not set for action type configfiles.deploy” (code 42)

Make sure that you ran rhn-actions-control.

‘Seeing’ Server Commands

osad -N -v -v -v -v

Unregistering a Client

Open /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/rhnplugin.conf and change

enabled = 1

to

enabled = 0

You may also want to clean up and reinstall RHN-related packages

yum remove rhn*

Sources