Spacewalk is open-source systems management software for system provisioning, patching and configuration licensed under the GNU GPLv2. The project was discontinued on 31 May 2020 with 2.10 being the last official release. SUSE forked the spacewalk code base in 2018 with uyuni-project

Overview

Features

Spacewalk encompasses the following functions:

Architecture

Spacewalk Server: Server represents managing System Spacewalk Client: A system managed by a Spacewalk server Spacewalk is controlled by the following Interfaces: Subscription Management: Backend Database:

Upstream and downstream versions

A number of DownStream versions use upstream Spacewalk version as the basis of their System Provision, patch and errata management: Support for particular client OSes, server OSes, system architectures, backend databases, and subscription services varies between versions and releases.

Oracle Spacewalk

Oracle introduced their own version of Spacewalk particularly to provide a familiar alternative for those switching from a different vendor while Oracle Enterprise Manager remains Oracle Corporation's preferred way of managing systems. Spacewalk for Oracle® Linux is designed to be hosted on Oracle Linux (OL). The about section of the release notes in Oracle Spacewalk 2.x Documentation indicate only minor branding changes and changes for GPG keys

Red Hat Satellite 5

Red Hat Satellite 5 is a licensed downstream adaption of Spacewalk with added functionality to manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux Subscriptions. In the active years of the Red Hat Satellite 5 lifecycle Spacewalk was simply known as the upstream project for Satellite. The relationship between Spacewalk and Red Hat Satellite 5 was analogous to the relationship between Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. With the emergence of Red Hat Satellite 6 with based on a fundamentally different toolset, end of lifecycle phase of Red Hat Satellite 5 and the emergence of downstream spacewalk based offerings from Oracle and SUSE newer versions of Spacewalk may not have this close relationship.

SUSE Manager Server

In March 2011 Novell released SUSE Manager 1.2, based on Spacewalk 1.2 and supporting the management of both SUSE Linux Enterprise and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In May 2018, during the openSUSE conference in Prague, it was announced that a fork of Spacewalk, called Uyuni, was being created. Named after the salt flat in Bolivia, Uyuni uses Salt for configuration management and React as the user interface framework. From version 4.0, SUSE Manager is based on Uyuni as its upstream project.

History and development

Development

Red Hat developed the Red Hat Network to manage subscriptions software management and created the Red Hat Satellite application as a central management point with the user network. For Red Hat Satellite version 5 the Satellite Function was implemented by a toolset named Project Spacewalk. Red Hat announced in June 2008 Project Spacewalk was to be made open source under the GPLv2 License Satellite 5.3 was the first version to be based on upstream Spacewalk code.

Stewardship and governance

In the Spacewalk FAQ issued in 2015 after the release of Red Hat Satellite 6 Red Hat. Satellite 5 went end-of-life on 31 May 2020, the Spacewalk project was discontinued at the same time.

Builds

Upstream build

Releases

Criticisms

In a 2019 paper considering Linux open-source patching tools, Spacewalk was commended for having a software inventory and community support but limited support for distributions; notably, Ubuntu was an issue.

Miscellaneous

Note

Resources