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Spacewalk, it’s pretty damn awesome. Or at least, I think it is. It’s an open source linux systems management solution from Redhat (GPLv2).

Once you get spacewalk up and running, you’ll be amazed by some of the things it does. It can push config files, packages, inventory systems, group them and allow you to work exclusively with those groups in a very easy way. That’s only scratching the surface of what spacewalk is capable of.

I like it because I can setup custom channels where I can push custom software to each of my servers. From time to time though, I notice that the repos don’t really rebuild automatically. If you look at the “details” section of your channel, you’ll notice something like this

The times don’t match. It probably means that the taskomatic daemon is not running or is running but isn’t really pulling tasks from the database.

To verify, login to sqlplus and run this query

sqlplus spacewalk/spacewalk@xe

ORG_ID TASK_NAME
---------- ----------------------------------------------------------------
TASK_DATA PRIORITY EARLIEST
---------- ---------- ---------
1 update_errata_cache_by_channel
122 0 13-NOV-10


Notice how some tasks are older? This table should almost always be empty or only have data for a small period of time as the name suggests.

Restarting taskomatic is as simple as


[root@spacewalk init.d]# ./taskomatic stop
Stopping RHN Taskomatic...
Stopped RHN Taskomatic.
[root@spacewalk init.d]# ./taskomatic start
Starting RHN Taskomatic...


Wait about 10 minutes, because that’s the polling time for taskomatic, and then check the database again. There should be no rows


SQL> select * from rhnTaskQueue;

no rows selected
SQL>


Also check the spacewal UI and look for something like this

or

Spacewalk is still very much in its infancy but it shows great promise and there is a great community of people who are willing to help and are dedicated to making it a rich and feature full product. Spacewalk 1.1 was released recently and we haven’t had a chance to upgrade yet but I continue to see great things coming from spacewalk and that makes me happy.

I’m sure this has been well documented elsewhere but I’m too lazy to go search for it.

I found this little gem today but had been wondering for weeks now about his purpose.

note the blue triangle

So the triangle’s purpose is very similar to the “I’m feeling Lucky” button. Hit enter once and you’ll be instantly directed to that page. I love this feature!

Bonus! ascii google logo! when you search for “ascii art” but only appears when you don’t use google’s new javascript magic to search as it maintains the existing logo. http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=ascii+art

Google Chrome’s Omnibar seems to be fairly robust and useful just like Mozilla Firefox’s Awesomebar. I like that you can add search engines and keyword them just like bookmarks in Firefox.

Here are some of the ones I found useful.

map | http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=es&q=%s
gl | http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&btnI=I’m+Feeling+Lucky

That’s it so far.

Update: I don’t know when i’ll use it but i know I use it quite a bit when i watch foreign films. It allows for easy translation. You can do more

en2fr | http://translate.google.com/?hl=en&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=en&tl=fr&q=%s
en2es | http://translate.google.com/?hl=en&layout=1&eotf=1&sl=en&tl=es&q=%s