Spacewalk

» see spacewalkproject.github.io as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Red Hat Network started in 2001 as a hosted service that kept subscribers' machines patched over the wire. Customers who were not allowed to let their servers talk to the open internet bought the on-premises version instead, Red Hat Satellite, and ran the whole thing inside their own walls. On 18 June 2008, at Red Hat Summit, chief executive Jim Whitehurst said that code was being released under the GPL and developed in public. The project it turned into was called Spacewalk.

The work it did was unglamorous and large. Spacewalk kept an inventory of every machine registered to it and pushed packages and errata out to them on a schedule. It held the kickstart profiles that built new servers from bare metal, then managed the configuration files those servers ran afterward. If you had four hundred Linux boxes in a data center, Spacewalk was the table that told you which of them were missing a patch.

Version 1.0 did not ship until 2010, roughly two years after the announcement, which tells you how much code had to be untangled from Red Hat's own infrastructure first. The last release was 2.10, on 18 March 2020. Ten weeks after that, on 31 May 2020, the project was declared discontinued, which was the same day Red Hat Satellite 5 reached its own end of life.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the free half of a paid product ~

The project FAQ laid the bargain out in a comparison table that most open core companies would never print. Satellite was the stable and supported one. Spacewalk got the newest technology early and often, which is a polite way of saying it would break on you. Red Hat wrote both of those columns itself and put them next to each other on the same page.

Because the license was real, other people took it. Oracle shipped its own build of Spacewalk for Oracle Linux and wrote its own documentation for it, and that documentation is still online. A GPL release invites exactly that, and Red Hat did not pretend otherwise.

~ the fork that outlived it ~

In May 2018 SUSE forked the codebase into a project called Uyuni and swapped the old client stack for Salt and containers. Uyuni became the upstream of SUSE Manager, which is the same job Spacewalk had been doing for Satellite. Two years later Uyuni was still cutting releases, so the code carried on under a new name while the project that produced it stopped.

~ the machines you have to have ~

Spacewalk was for people who counted their servers in hundreds. My own work is computer vision on a small number of boards in Ankara, where the fleet is short enough to update by hand and the hard problem is what happens on the device rather than what happens to four hundred of them at once. Software like this is invisible right up until the morning you have too many machines to hold in your head. Spacewalk existed for the people on the other side of that morning, and I have only ever read their manuals.

~ the page is still up ~

spacewalkproject.github.io still serves the project's own site, screenshots and all, with a line near the top of the introduction saying the project was discontinued on May 31 2020. Everything underneath that line is written in the present tense. The FAQ still asks what Spacewalk is and answers that it is an open source Linux systems management solution, because nobody went back to change the verbs.

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