PostgreSQL
The PostgreSQL database support now covers all areas of the Spacewalk project, including monitoring.
Historically, RHN Satellite and thus Spacewalk servers required Oracle RDBMS as database backend. In order to make the whole Spacewalk project use open source software, support for PostgreSQL as database backend has been added.
This is a page describing the status of the PostgreSQL support as of 7th March, 2012, Spacewalk version 1.7.
Follow PostgreSQLServerSetup.
When installing Spacewalk, you install spacewalk-postgresql which should give you correct backend and dependencies.
# yum install spacewalk-postgresql
Then, when you run spacewalk-setup, you'll be asked for connection information:
# spacewalk-setup --disconnected
** Database: Setting up database connection for PostgreSQL backend.
Hostname (leave empty for local)?
Database? spaceschema
Username? spaceuser
Password? spacepw
** Database: Populating database.
The spacewalk-setup finishes and you are good to go -- enjoy your Spacewalk on PostgreSQL!
If you have an existing Spacewalk with Oracle backend installation, you can use it as a base of your Spacewalk on PostgreSQL setup -- see DatabaseMigrations.
If you want to do a bit of coding, send a patch to the [email protected] mailing list. See below for porting hints.
You can also just report the problem on either [email protected] mailing list or (the more user-oriented) [email protected]. Please make sure you have the relevant log parts ready.
You can also file bugzilla.
At PostgreSQLPortingGuide we list issues that we were addressing while making Spacewalk work with the PostgreSQL database backend. Please use it as a reference of fixes when you hit an issue and want to create a patch for it.
When Spacewalk is installed and spacewalk-setup run for the first time, database is populated with necessary database objects via psql from /etc/sysconfig/rhn/postgres/main.sql. So this is the file you want to edit if you need to fix something in the schema on your installation. Then rerun spacewalk-setup, it will prompt to clear the schema. Watch /var/log/rhn/populate_db.log for any errors during population of the schema in the PostgreSQL database.
Of course, to preserve the changes, you need to get them to the Spacewalk git repo, so that they get to the next nightly spacewalk-schema package. For PostgreSQL, the schema is compiled from files in the schema/spacewalk/common/ and schema/spacewalk/postgres/ directories in the Spacewalk git repo. A file should be either in the common/ or in postgres/ subdirectory, not in both.
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Spacewalk on PostgreSQL by Jan Pazdziora
- The history and state of the port, issues that we hit, examples, and hopefully an inspiration for you to contribute or use our experience in migration of your legacy applications.
