Red Hat Network

Template:Short description Template:Primary sources Red Hat Network (abbreviated to RHN) is a family of systems-management services operated by Red Hat. RHN makes updates, patches, and bug fixes of packages included within Red Hat Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux available to subscribers. Other available features include the deployment of custom content to, and the provisioning, configuration, reporting, monitoring of client systems.

Users of these operating systems can then invoke the up2date or yum program to download and install updates from RHN. The updates portion of RHN is akin to other types of automatic system maintenance tools such as Microsoft Update for Microsoft Windows operating systems. The system requires a subscription to allow access to updates.

On June 18, 2008, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst announced plans for the RHN Satellite software to be open-sourced following the Fedora/RHEL model.<ref name="linuxworld-news-061808">Red Hat Network to be open-sourced Template:Webarchive, Chris Kanaracus, IDG News Service, 06.18.08. Retrieved from LinuxWorld.com on June 20, 2008</ref> Subsequently, project Spacewalk was launched.

Architecture

In the basic subscription model the information about a managed host is stored on Red Hat's servers, and updates get downloaded directly from those servers as well. For an organization that manages multiple machines this is inefficient bandwidth-wise. Red Hat offers a proxy server (Red Hat Network Proxy) that once installed at a site allows machines to securely download updates locally. Advanced lifecycle management; provisioning features, like bare metal PXE boot provisioning; and monitoring features (e.g. centralized CPU and disk usage) cannot be done over the Internet to the hosted RHN servers. These features require a RHN Satellite Server running locally. Template:As of the RHN Proxy Server costs $2,500 annually, and the RHN Satellite Server costs $13,500 annually, which includes the license for the embedded Oracle Database.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

History

Date	Version	Description
late 2000		Red Hat Network is born as hosted service.
late 2001		RHN Proxy Server has been created.
January 2002		citation	CitationClass=web }}</ref>
February 2002		RHN Satellite server created as standalone version of RHN.
October 2002		citation	CitationClass=web }}</ref>
2004	RHN 3.2 released	introducing provisioning, Bootstrap Script, Refined Channel Cloning
Spring 2004	RHN 3.3 released
July 20, 2004	RHN 3.4 released
December 15, 2004	RHN 3.6 released	introducing Monitoring as technology preview, supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 3 as base operating system, rhn boostrap utility and push technology (using jabber protocol)
March 22, 2005	RHN 3.7 released
August 31, 2005	RHN 4.0 released
February 2, 2007	citation	CitationClass=web }}</ref>	supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 clients
June 26, 2007	citation	CitationClass=web }}</ref>	introducing virtualization management support.
April 7, 2008	RHN Satellite 5.1 released	citation	CitationClass=web }}</ref>
June 18, 2008		RHN Satellite (and Proxy) is open source'd. Project Spacewalk is born.
November 5, 2008	citation	CitationClass=web }}</ref>	citation	CitationClass=web }}</ref>
September 2, 2009	RHN Satellite 5.3 released	citation	CitationClass=web }}</ref>
October 27, 2010	RHN Satellite 5.4 released	citation	CitationClass=web }}</ref>
June 16, 2011	RHN Satellite 5.4.1 released	citation	CitationClass=web }}</ref>
September 21, 2012	RHN Satellite 5.5 released	IPv6 Enablement, OpenSCAP Support, Clone-By-Date Capability, Provisioning Bonded Network Interfaces
October 1, 2013	RHN Satellite 5.6 released	Enhanced subscription and system reporting, Client system service analysis, Inter-Satellite Sync (ISS) content management and trust refinement, Red Hat Satellite server hot-backups, Automated provisioning in PXE-less environments, Red Hat Satellite server scalability, Choice of external, DBA-managed database

External links

• Red Hat Network (login to the hosted RHN application)
• RHN Satellite
• Project Spacewalk

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