Stratus FT 4300 and RHEL, Part 3

Now down to some sysadmin hacking.

The object here is to create a custom software channel on our Red Hat Satellite server for Stratus' kernel rpm's for the ft 4300 and to make this as automatic as possible.
To see what I was getting into, I pulled down the rpm's from their repository at "http://pman3.com/ftLinux/4.0/redhat/." Basically they were just several debug kernels from Red Hat and yum. Nothing custom, nothing fancy, nothing numerous. I suppose Stratus wants the debug kernels available to help in troubleshooting issues.

A side note here: I have to laud Stratus' support. It is top notch, at least for VOS, their proprietary operating system.

Even though these rpm's are not critical to the operation of the ft4300 running RHEL, I decided to move ahead with the software channel.

First up, I wrote a bash script to pull down the rpms and push them into a software channel.

#!/bin/bash
#
# 5 Jul 2007 Jason B Consorti
# Rev 1.0

# Wget Options Explanation
# --no-verbose
# Quiet, but not TOO QUIET
# -e
# Use the following as if they were in a .wgetrc file.
# Used here to explicitly set the proxy server
# --no-clobber
# Don't bother downloading something we already have.
# --recursive
# Act like a crawler and grab everything
# -l 1
# Stop wget from moving about the website
# --no-directories
# Don't bother making a directory hierarchy; just put
# all grabbed files into one spot.
# --directory-prefix
# Put all of the retrieved files into /var/stratus
# --accept \*rpm
# We're only interested in pulling down rpm files.

/usr/bin/wget --no-verbose -e 'http_proxy = http://our.corporate.proxy.server' --no-clobber --recursive -l 1 --no-directories --directory-prefix=/var/stratus --accept \*rpm http://pman3.com/ftLinux/4.0/redhat/

# This find command will look in the /var/stratus directory for any recently
# downloaded rpms and will then push them into the Satellite server's
# software channel for our stratus boxes.
# A special user account set up for this purpose is used.


/usr/bin/find /var/stratus -mtime -1 -name \*rpm -exec /usr/bin/rhnpush --channel=stratus-yum-x86_64 --username=stratus --password=PASSWORD {} \;

I then created a user called "stratus" and a custom software channel called "stratus-yum-x86_64" and made it a child of RHEL AS 4 for x86_64 servers. I also gave the user "stratus" privileges to push to that channel.

I created the /var/stratus subdirectory and added this script to root's crontab.

# Daily pull of Stratus' YUM channel for RHEL 4
0 7 * * * /usr/local/bin/stratus_daily.sh >/dev/null 2>/dev/null


The script is a little kludgey: there are no locks and the find script is a cheap way out. I'll have to work on that later.