Spacewalk provided by Oracle is only supported on Oracle Linux 6 (x86_64).

You should install Oracle Linux 6 using the Minimal or Basic Server software set. If you select additional package groups during installation, you must remove the jta package before installing Spacewalk, as this package causes Spacewalk services to fail to start.

Only install Spacewalk using the packages provided by Oracle from the Oracle Public Yum repository at http://public-yum.oracle.com.

No third‑party package repositories are required to install Spacewalk on Oracle Linux 6. All the required packages are available in the Oracle Linux Spacewalk repository.

A database is required to store the Spacewalk data. The database options are:

Oracle only supports Oracle Database for use with Spacewalk. Oracle Database XE and PostgreSQL are not supported.

Oracle does not provide any tools for migrating from an unsupported database.

SQL> create user spacewalk identified by password;
SQL> grant connect,resource to spacewalk;
SQL> grant alter session, create synonym, create table, create trigger, create view to spacewalk; 
SQL> grant unlimited tablespace to spacewalk; 

# echo /usr/lib/oracle/11.2/client64/lib > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/oracle‑instantclient11.2.conf 
# ldconfig

To ensure that errata mapping is maintained for all versions of each package, Spacewalk mirrors all available versions of all available packages. As a result, the storage requirements for a Spacewalk server can be significant, based on the number of major versions and architectures you chose to support. As a guide, the Oracle Linux binary repositories require approximately 50GB for each architecture, with an extra 30-40GB required for source packages.

If you use a local yum server to mirror ULN (see the section called “Using Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN) Instead of Oracle Public Yum”), you require double the amount of disk space because packages are stored on the yum mirror server as well as the Spacewalk server.

You must configure the Spacewalk server with a fully-qualified domain name (FQDN). Clients must be able to resolve the FQDN in DNS (forward and reverse lookups), otherwise PXE booting does not work.

The following table shows the required network ports depending on the configuration of the Spacewalk server.

Oracle Linux channels can be configured using the spacewalk‑common‑channels command provided in the spacewalk‑utils package. This command can automatically configure the required software channels, yum repositories, GPG keys and activation keys for both Oracle Linux 5 and 6.

The following channels can be created using the spacewalk-common-channels command:

For example, to create 32‑bit and 64‑bit software channels for Oracle Linux 6, install the spacewalk‑utils package and then run the spacewalk‑common‑channels tool, as follows:

# yum install spacewalk‑utils  
# spacewalk‑common‑channels -v -u <admin> -p <password> -a i386,x86_64 -k unlimited ‘oraclelinux6*’

Use the spacewalk‑common‑channels -h command to see full usage information.

After you have configured and synchronized the software channels, you must create an activation key so that servers can register to those channels.

Create an activation key for each base channel and architecture you configured. If you configured all the channels, you need four activation keys, two for Oracle Linux 5 (i386 and x86_64) and two for Oracle Linux 6 (i386 and x86_64).

You synchronize software as follows:

In some circumstances, the Spacewalk installation can fail if the slf4j (Simple Logging Facade for Java) package is installed. The workaround is to remove the slf4j package. Be aware that Eclipse depends on this package, so you either have to uninstall Eclipse or remove the package with the rpm -e --nodeps slf4j command.

If Tomcat fails to start after the initial configuration of Spacewalk, check that the geronimo‑1.1‑jta‑api package is installed. If Oracle Linux is installed using a software set other than Minimal or Basic Server, the jta package might be installed on the system and the presence of this package prevents the geronimo‑1.1‑jta‑api package from being installed. If the geronimo‑1.1‑jta‑api package is missing, you might have to install it manually, after removing the jta package. The geronimo‑1.1‑jta‑api package is required to ensure that all the Spacewalk services start correctly.

The Spacewalk client conflicts with the up2date client installed by default for connectivity to the Unbreakable Linux Network. Before you install the Spacewalk client for Oracle Linux 5, remove the up2date and up2date‑gnome packages manually using the rpm -e --nodeps command.

If the Spacewalk server was installed without a fully-qualified domain name (FQDN), or a name that cannot be resolved in DNS, Spacewalk creates invalid PXE boot configuration files.

You can validate that Cobbler is configured correctly by checking that the IP address used in the ks= parameter in the /var/lib/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default file is correct.

To reconfigure a Spacewalk server after installation: