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amandowaraFlag for India

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Opensource product for managing Linux patch update

Hello,

We are looking for an opensource product for managing Linux patch on our servers.  The product should act as a centralized repository for having all the Linux packages and on demand basis, it should upgrade the Linux clients with the latest packages. In addition, it should be capable of generating reports on patch level against each linux servers in the network.

Could you please recommend or suggest any product as such to us?

I have been searching the internet but could find anything which is suitable for us.

Thanks.
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Tintin

Any particular Linux distro or a mix of them?
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Redhat Linux or CentOS
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Tintin

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Hi Tintin,

I have spent considerable amount of my time and energy in making the Spacewalk work for our environment. Later I got to know that Spacewalk is an opensource product released to public (especially to GNU community) for testing purpose and for enhancing its features. Due to this factor, the Spacewalk servers are not programmed for downloading the packages to channels from RHN network. This is a major constraint for using Spacewalk in production environment. But still am not 100% sure that we can't make spacewalk to work  in production environment.

Do you know how to configure spacewalk and make it working in live environment? or have you seen anyone using Spacewalk in production environment? Please let me know.  I desperately need a solution for it.

Satellite is ofcourse good. But my company is not ready to afford for the license. They want some solution using opensource.
 
Thankyou
I've usedconfigured  Satellite, but haven't used Spacewalk.  I know that Spacewalk can't download the RHEL packages from Redhat and that you have to download them manually (there may be a way around this).

What about just using RHN for the RHEL servers (what level of subscription do you have) and Spacewalk for Centos?
We have got 50 licenses for RHEL servers from Redhat. Configuring Spacewalk for CentOS is still a question for me. The way around which you are telling is still UNKNOWN for me :)

Our requirement basically is to generate patch report against each Linux server and present it to the developers or application owners of those servers. By looking at the report, they may tell us which packages needs to be upgraded or discarded. Since it is a live environment, we can't update the packages directly. Please let me know if you anything which is fit in our requirement.

If we can't escape from procuring license, please recommend some cheap product which can solve our   purpose. Thanks again for your inputs :)
Redhat "licenses" are known as subscriptions.  A subscription entitles you to Redhat Support and for each server with a subscription to access the Redhat Network (RHN) for patch updates.  Depending on your level of subscription, determines what level of support you have and what additional features of RHN are available to you.

The only major difference between Satellite and Spacewalk is that you have to manually/semi-manually populate the Redhat/CentOS packages.
This URL https://fedorahosted.org/spacewalk/wiki/UploadContent seems to contain details for downloading packages to Spacewalk server. Will this work for RHEL servers?  Please confirm, so that I can do a re-attempt to use spacewalk server.
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Hi Tintin,  I will surely give a try again using this method. Thanks a lot for your help !