Red Hat Satellite 5.2 released

In an earlier post, I mentioned I was unable to fit Red Hat Satellite or Fedora Spacewalk into our infrastructure. The previous version of Red Hat Satellite required Oracle 9i (we run 10g), and Spacewalk requires a derivative of RHEL/CentOS 5 (our standard is version 4). I saw this release today by Red Hat announcing Satellite version 5.2. It now supports Oracle 10g, and still runs on RHEL4 or RHEL5. Too bad everyone is hurting now and pulling the purse strings on their budgets. It would be tough for me to ask for a RHEL AS4 and a Satellite 5.2 license now.

I wonder how hard it would be to backport Spacewalk to RHEL4?

What We Should Strive Toward In Operations

I generally keep up with the O'Reilly Sysadmin blog (http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog/), although I sometimes find the content and the frequency of updates disappointing. To be fair, you would probably say the same thing about this blog . However, today, they had a blog entry that pointed to another blog entry about "Operations Mantras" that I found interesting.

O'Reilly Link:
http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog/2008/02/operations_mantras.html

Operations Mantra Link:
http://dormando.livejournal.com/484577.html

It's a long read, and I'm not totally finished with it, but I found some useful thoughts and some points that give me self-affirmation that I'm not a total screw-up when it comes to system administration.

Some examples of points that I'm interested in following up on are

- In "Understand your data storage and databases", it suggests to investigate starling and Gearman
- The topics brought up in "Asynchronous Jobs"
- In "Use source control", avoid SVN and use Git or Mercurial instead (I'm assuming because these use distributed repositories for version control instead of a central one)

There are also some interesting technical and non-technical theories, practices, and procedures mentioned as well.

Clean cabling in the datacenter

Often, clean cabling in the datacenter is neglected; especially by yours truly. It's a hassle, it takes time, and usually you cut corners because you're trying to get other tasks done. However, I was sent this blog post that shows good cabling. I may have re-think about investing the time to do cabling right.

http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=240