[Music] good morning good afternoon good evening wherever you may be hailing from this is Red Hat Enterprise Linux presents I'm your host Eric the IT guy Hendricks and joining me is the illustrious the amazing Mr Brian Smith hey Eric how you doing today uh honestly I'm exhausted but for very very good reason um in case you in case you haven't seen as of today as of this morning real 9.4 is out in the wild uh real 8.10 will be out in the coming days but real 9.4 is out there it's in a in a repository or an ISO near you so go check out the release notes uh we'll we'll have a live stream on this channel coming up uh next week's Summit oh my gosh there's so much going on no wonder I'm tired so we have Summit next week and then the week after uh we'll have a a live stream on this channel grab the the product update and add that to your calendar uh one other while we're while we're on the topic Brian U I don't know if You' noticed but up up up there yonder there's a QR code because the conversation doesn't stop when this uh when the stream stops we've got a Discord server we've got something like 80 some odd people in there right now and is growing every day so if if you want to continue the conversation make sure to join us on our Discord server would love to engage with you all there but other than that Brian what are we talking about today I got so excited about everything else what are we doing yeah one one of my one of my favorite topics actually we're gonna be talking about red hat satellite today and all the amazing things you can do with it I love redot satellites um at least at least the way it is now because back in the day like in the satellite 5.x time frame was when I was an administrator and th those were dark days we we don't talk about those days but uh really really excited um so with that said why don't we bring in our guest we've got uh Pete Saget joining us today welcome to the show Pete hey guys thanks for having me glad to have you why don't you uh why don't you introduce yourself tell us who you are what you do and then uh something you do for fun oh something for fun um okay uh well um I'm Pete Saget I'm a senior technical account manager here with red hat uh supporting the FSI uh teams and uh this is my second Tour of Duty as you could say at Red Hat I've been here cumulatively for about um 10 years now um all of them pretty much in the TAM Space so um yeah um let's see here what do I do for fun yikes other than working for Red Hat um yeah I like to uh I like to try and convince my three kids uh that computers are cool and fun and that they should join me in doing them um um because I think uh as a parent right you want them to kind of take after you and or at least one of them um right so I like spending time with my kids and and playing games with them and and just doing fun science stuff and sometimes that revolves around around computers so very cool well let's Pete let's start by just covering for anyone watching who's not familiar with satellite just at a high level what is Red Hat satellite and what can it do yeah red hat satellite redhead satellite's a really cool tool so as as Eric kind of alluded to um a little bit earlier here you know previous versions of satellite I mean I went back personally I've been using it since since four uh and five it's obviously changed quite a bit um with with six six was a was a complete rewrite right and um whereas four and five were were you know based on on on the Upstream Space Walk six is is pretty much a um a Col of individual Upstream tools that are really uh Red Hat um Red Hat focused right for for our customers and the main component of satellite that that um I like um or most of our customers use is the patching and life cycle component the content uh procurement there's a whole lot of other features within satellite and the kind of the main thing that we're going to talk about today is the life cycle portion and the content management portion um but it's it's more than that it's grown to be a a whole organizational management tool very cool and so you mentioned older versions of of satellite like satellite four and five so th at this point those are no longer supported right and people should be on satellite 6 is that is that right oh yeah yeah I mean you can uh you know I'm sure there's some there there there's some holdouts there right but um you know the nice thing about satellite is like I said it's a it's a a group of Upstream projects so um you know I I know of customers that use satellite and then they have a separate Upstream environment like uh Foreman for doing certain things but um but yeah satellite 6 has has been around now uh for quite a while it's gotten very very mature uh it's been nice to see it kind of grow from the 6.0 version that it that it used to be we had some Growing Pains like anything when it comes to a complete rewrite of the product um but it's become very very both um and um very powerful tool for most s ad and we we were talking about moving to satellite 6 and I can think of no better reason than right now to do so uh because as of what about a week ago maybe five days ago at the time we recording uh satellite 6.15 was just released and and kind of skimming through uh skimming through some of the some of the highlights uh looks like just a lot more stability a lot more uh reliability coming in in this release there's a few new reports there's a few uh there's a few uh UI changes some workflow changes to make it a little bit easier to to interact with some of the Wizards U so all in all very very stability focused release uh which should make it more performant a little bit more reliable um and so I'm just really excited to see the the satellite engineering team kind of taking this time to uh to focus on cleaning house instead of instead of always trying to produce something new or introduce breaking changes yeah and let's not let's not forget about the most important change uh that came with 615 which is um the UI change when it comes to the the fly out menu right I think a lot of us if you've been using satellite 6 for a while I know we've made some changes where the where the bar was at the top uh and you could click on and have that fold out and then it moved to the leth hand side uh and then for me and for a lot of people it's it's kind of been a bit of a frustration right when we click somewhere close to that menu it it slides out and then it and then it stays there for a little bit without the ability to kind of um click and hide it away so um 615 um that that's a new feature that I really really like so that might be something good to actually show show people do you have 615 you got you got me there Brian our uh our Labs we haven't we haven't updated them here uh to 615 yet so may maybe next time okay on air we'll have uh we'll have the uh we'll have a whole session on just that menu I mean I'm pretty excited about it but uh M much like most of our most of our viewers and our customers right we can't just be slapping new updates into production we've got to wait for some downtime but yes they uh he got me the good news is though never fear Brian the good news is that uh coming up the summer I don't know when and I don't know what time but coming up the summer we are planning a satellite miniseries so we're looking at about six episodes or so that'll take you from I installed this thing now what do I do with it to hopefully having some sort of a some sort of good uh understanding of how some of the different tools work together well let's talk Pete a little bit more about some of the other use cases you mentioned you know patch management life cycle management stuff like that what what are some of the other common use cases that people are using satellite for yeah so one of the other uh big use cases that are our customers to using it for is for provisioning so much like you know previous versions of satellite way back when um doing Kickstart builds right off right off the satellite servers is pretty common um you know from the from real basic uh setups just kick it and then um manually configure it to us using all the provisioning tools that are in there um and you know again I know you guys talk about a a summer series on satellite you could basically do a whole summer on just a provisioning portion um of satellite uh because we you know can do things from kickstarts to pixie boots um we can configure satellite to essentially be your DHCP and DNS um manager um we can tie into compute resources like VMware and provision systems um from there um we can do Discovery where the systems get built up and we get them automatically imported into into satellite and then build based on some templates that we we established so T templates is a whole other thing we could probably spend a lot of time on um and I could probably briefly go on those uh in in a little while here as we do kind of a full overview but uh the templates are basically just reusable code they're um uh Ruby Erb templates um um and you can basically kind of uh mix and dice them up however you want to configure your system from you know partitioning um to packages that you want to install or user creation all that kind of good stuff um some other stuff and and one that I'm I really like I think it's awesome I think it's a great onew punch uh with r as as an offering is insights insights came out trying to think it's it's been a while now guys I you know I want to say like it's been like five years that that insights has been out but it doesn't it feels like it's it's been less than that but insights is redhe hat insights is a is an integration within satellite now where we can do remediation on either patch uh patches or cve um if for those that don't know what insights is insights is basically a a tool that allows us to do analysis on our systems or your systems and determine if there's any uh performance mismatches based on things that you may have installed um or if there's a security risk with how you have something configured it's a very very very cool tool it's one of the coolest tools I think that we have here at Red Hat sorry about any of the other product teams that are out there I just really love love insights because I think it's you know you get it with the with the real um you know entitlement right and it's such a great value ad but now that we have it tied in through satellite uh is even um greater value because you don't have to go um necessarily through the cloud Council to to push those remediations um another another area um that the customers will use satellite is the compliance feature so you can do open escap uh things in set baselines um download the policies and and apply them to host groups um or host Collections and see exactly you know if a system is out of that that standard um and then not so much nowadays especially with the the prevalence of things like um anable but remote execution obviously has its has its part within satellite when we just want to apply a radar or apply a a quick patch U maybe it's a the next harp bad or whatever we can do um some remote execution right through right through satellite itself so yeah very cool we did we did have a question about what version of re that you can run satellite 6.5 on and my understanding is that um s 6 615 will only run on top of Ro 8 currently and um one thing to keep in mind though is it can manage you know other versions of RA so you can manage you know obviously R seven r eight and r nine with that but right now with C 615 my understanding is that it does only run on real eight currently that would be uh real 9 is a satellite uh operating system is still on the road map um I don't I don't know that we've heard any any idea of when that might be coming but uh I'm I'm sure it's in the works by now we are up to real 94 so um so you you've got me excited about some of the UI changes uh because we we all live within within our tools all day every day so why don't we why don't we dive in and how about you give us a quick tour yeah let's uh let's take a look at um at kind of the overview of satellite uh when we log in here this is kind of just your opening pain um the one thing that I'll point out here is is and again this is going to be a very cuz we we want to obviously get into the the meat and potatoes of the of the live stream here when it comes to life cycle management and content views but the one thing I want to point out here especially when it comes to satellite is that we're we're pulling in typically for for Content management we're pulling in very large repositories and a lot of packages and this this tasks portion here um is is a good thing to to know because uh when we pull this up you'll see all your running tasks and and you can see we we were doing some housekeeping or I should say I was doing some housekeeping um you know the uh uh the last couple days here but you can see all the repositories that are being being synced um and the status and stop States and occasionally um no no products perfect right but occasionally uh repositories will get hung up or something will get kind of kind of messed up and and you'll have to kind of cancel these out but it's a it's it's a good area to go when things are are kind of backing up or aren't working as you you would you would suspect uh but just something to something to keep in mind here um the main tab that I think a lot of people are going to live in in terms of satellite is going to be the the content tab here and this is kind of where we all get started so from a high level really we start with subscriptions and your subscriptions are basically uh what you're uh allowed to use allowed to pull from the red hat CDN and and um since I work for Red Hat we've got this fun little employee skew which basically gives us everything underneath the sun um although you think you want that but if you actually use that skew you'll find out that it's a delus of a ton of products so trying to find and work especially if you're not registering a system directly to satellite let's just say uh you know pulling down your available repositories disabling them and then going one through one to find what you want can be a little bit of a hassle but um you know the employee skew when we go through the repositories you'll see just a ton of repositories and and that's because of it but these subscriptions get pulled through uh from your manifest manifest and the one thing that I really like and we added this relatively early on with satellite was the ability to kind of refresh your manifest uh if you made changes uh to it um directly within this pane here which is really nice um another thing that I want to point out is this simple content access and I think uh for those of you that have been with with satellite 6 for a while now um this is a godsend uh the the sea basically um allows you to uh it's a it's a soft limit on your entitlements and it can be a a blessing or a curse depending on which side of the checkbook you're on right but sea basically it used to be where if you you wanted to use an entitlement on a box you'd have to attach the entitlements to the activation key and then let's say you only had a 100 entitlements ra entitlements and you wanted to push to 101 but you didn't realize you were at the limit you were pretty much shut down then you'd have to go back and you'd have to find out okay who's using my entitlements and all this other kind of fun stuff that assist admins have to have to spend our time on um SCA pretty much does away with that it's pretty much a hey you know we'll let you use what you want to use but eventually you'll kind of have to pay up so that's where the uh the curse kind of comes depending on on where you're looking so you could very easily um run into a case where next thing you know you've got you know hundreds more systems deployed than you thought you had because your Dev teams are in there or whatever so um I like it that it doesn't stop you from doing what you need to do on a on a dayto day but you do need to keep it track keep track on it and I had this tab um up here just for this very reason um you know subscription watch is something that we've also tied into this uh and this is on conso at redhead.com and you can kind of see all the subscriptions that you're using so you can kind of keep track of it so we're giving you the tools and the information to make informed decisions in your guys environments and making sure that you're not using um yes free at last exactly the sca um but it it it will allow you to go go far over as much as you want we'll let you take it right to the cliff um but um just something to be mindful there yeah I'll just I'll just jump in we we also recently had Rich Dorito on the show to talk all about simple content access subscription watch all all the amazing functionality there so if you want more info on that definitely go back and watch that previous episode we had with him R I was looking for the link as as we were talking yeah I might go back and watch that because you know rich rich is you know I've known Rich since I've been here for for 10 years and that guy's you know Mastermind when it comes to satellite so yeah he he uh he also talked about how uh I think it's Q3 Brian correct me uh but I think Q3 simple content access will be on by uh by default or will be on permanently so right now it's it's sort of opt in but later on this year you'll be you'll be required to use uh some content access yeah that's uh that that's uh that's good to know um you know like I said s SCA um has been a big Boon for our customers you know when when having to play the entitlement entitlement game so to speak so um so yeah so uh your manifest will will pretty much control exactly what you have access to the the products that you can see which ties us directly back into this little uh product section here and these products are basically bundles uh little bundles that determine which repositories uh you now have access to based on the entitlements in your manifest um couple things to share here really quick um you know we've got we've got the the the real for x86 64 we've got the EOS um which allows us to basically stay put on a version of re uh for you know once it's gone to the next minor version um another thing to keep in mind here is you may see question may be hey why do I have this and why do I have this it's a good question uh you can look at the just this one this one will basically be up to seven uh this one right here this x 8664 will be uh 8 and N um just as a heads up there that you know there's there's delineation there I don't know why uh I don't know if you guys can can share on that but I think it was just switching over to the when we did appst streams uh when we bust when we put everything out to the base OS and the appstream for for modules in real 8 I think that's when they made that shift in the naming um the other thing that we have here is um products is not just something that uh you'll get from the Manifest if like I added this just for the demo purposes we've got eple 8 um so if we wanted wanted eple and all those extra packages those aren't coming from uh our man manest that we imported um this is basically creating a product um configuring it as a as a um a repository an RPM repository and then adding the gpg key in there um and so you can kind of see the the repositories and all the packages that are in there that are provided by that product um speaking of which when we create a uh when you want you know we're not limited to just Red Hat products themselves I mean you can add your own customer repositories and that's what makes the life cycle and the content view so useful for our customers is that um we can do your own repositories for your own applications so if you're writing your own RPMs um and it doesn't just have to be an RPM either you know we can do the puppet modules and other things like that um but you can pull in from any repository that you want and use that within your life cycle environments and your content views so um content credentials that's kind of where we establish um for you won't you won't have to do this for any of the red hat provided stuff but like for the Apple you can see here uh we got oh nobody look uh kidding uh the gpg key here uh for for Apple uh and you can see kind of the the products that are established it's super easy to do this kind of stuff uh there's great documentation that's one of the really nice things um on the portal is there's just a ton of good satellite documentation that goes over um a lot of this stuff in much more depth um then the other thing is is these um the sync plans and seek status so you know way way way way way back on satellite four and five um you know you had the same sync plans and S status um and this is kind of kind of similar so you might be doing you know the the nice thing is is with with when we get into life cycles um um you know life cycles basically prevent or I shouldn't say prevent but they allow you to segment your environments and only show content to those environments that you want to when you want to which is really important because if you just have your systems registered to rhn and you haven't done any configuration uh to them when new packages get get put to those repositories and somebody runs an update a yum update or a dnf update to the to the system you're pulling the latest greatest whatever it's registered to um with the life cycle environments you know we can we can um you know curtail that and prune and and decide when that kind of stuff happen so even if somebody runs a dnf update if there's no new packages that have been pushed since the last time you've done the patch pack p uh patching you're not going to have any it's just going to say nothing to do right um so the the the sync plans you know you might have I know for from my experience as a systems engineer for 10 years when we did patching you know we wouldn't pull we would pull packages in a week before we would do test and then just in the off chance somebody ran a dnf update or well it wasn't dnf at the time but uh a yum update or up to date um and um and so uh you know we would try and prevent that with with satellite uh with satellite 6 we can pull in the packages on a daily basis and not worry about um systems getting them that they shouldn't get them that being said uh we'll well I'll show you this there's a there's a Content view a default organizational view uh which is the library the library holds everything so it's it's basically just like being registered to to the red hat Network um but um when you do the sync uh when you do the Sync here you can configure it to do it you know every day or every night at 2 am whatever I think we do this on a weekly basis here for uh for some of our stuff um moving on here to the the sync status we can quickly see all the repositories um that we have access to and then um you know the the latest um state of them this thing and just to jump in here too what one really cool thing that that I like about satellite is you have a couple options when you're syncing a repository right like a a lot of these repositories are are quite large like the real you know appstream repository and you're probably only using a limited amount of of that you're probably not using every RPM in there so when you sync a repository you can choose do I want to do an immediate sync and sync everything in that repository or do I want to do an on demand where it's only going to sync the metadata and then sync the reposit the the actual packages as needed you know on demand so it can be a big time saer and space saver if you're not going to be using every package in there so you have a couple options um you can choose from there yeah 100% that's a good that's a good point to make um you know you're when you're configuring the repositories you can um you know choose like like Brian said you can do on demand um or you can you can just pull everything right and and some of these repositories have 40,000 you know packages in them and so it can it can take a while to do that initial sync um the other thing that we could probably tie into that and you guys will probably bring this up maybe in the summer series but like capsules and getting moving the content closer to where the systems might live so you might have you know systems out in AWS you've got a capsule out there that talks back to uh the satellite your your production satellite server but you don't need all the repositories out in your capsule you may only need a few uh they may be big ones and you can do what they call a lazy sync which is basically don't sync anything sync the metadata and when a client asks for the new update on HTTP or engine X or whatever it will go out and pull that for you and then you're limiting that you know that that that transfer so um here's the uh the all the repositories here and we can kind of see um you know theories that we've got access to um these will be um you know tied directly to excuse me did I skip over Red Hat repositories by the way I think I did didn't I guys I that was a pretty pretty pretty obvious one I think we skipped over it we we okay we'll mention it in pass all right so all these get pulled from from Red Hat repositories so you know what I'm going to go back because I I just realized I just completely skipped over Red Hat repositories there's too many awesome options within satellite that it's hard to keep track um these basically pulled from the products that we talked about earlier and um so if you're you're you've got entitlements for well well they're going to show up in here um the one thing that I really like they eventually added this in was it's recommended repositories you can click this on and it will show you the most uh used uh reposit that you want so like anal engine 2.9 for seven um you can see all the stuff that we've enabled here uh on the right hand side um I'm G to get to something newer other than six although I feel like there's some people out there that are still on six you know who you are but uh as long as no one comes out with as4 um let's see here yeah so uh here's a good example so we're pulling in a whole bunch of different of the eight versions so one thing I want people to be aware of is is that this base OS RPMs 8 channel is actually linked to whatever the latest minor release of R is and so right now that's 8.9 this will come into play in a little bit when we talk about content views and the difference between like your de development and your production environment excuse me um you know you can pull in you know some customers are like I'm staying on 8 .6 for as long as I can stay on 8.6 and then I'm going to swing in those EOS packages and stay there as long as I can stay uh for that time being and so you'd pull down the individual minor releases too um and that might be more pertinent to your production environments um but all these these repositories are basically then shifted over to and show up underneath your sync status and like I said you can schedule this however you want whenever you want um and man that uh it's taking a little bit to load this morning come on there we go okay so we can see we've got our extended update support for a whole bunch of different minor versions of real here J boss satellite Enterprise Linux um you know and then you you can choose to sync only certain ones uh if you want you don't need to sync them all um obviously you know if I would if I would let this rip uh it would it would take take uh take a little while and probably uh probably slow on the UI quite a bit so I kind of want to stagger them especially with the amount of content that we're pulling in um and really depending upon your environment will determine obviously what what you're all using here's our eple that we created uh or I created earlier uh just for of the extra packages you can see here so it's just not the red hat product so um briefly moving on here because I know we're we're getting getting along on on just a UI but uh the other section is is hosts and and really where you're going to live here is is this content host because the content hosts are basically all your hosts that are registered to satellite and um and are getting content uh you know depending on their life cycle environment you can see um all these systems that are registered you can see their their environment that they live in currently and their base content View and you know uh the security uh bug fix enhancements um and uh packages package updates that that are available to each system all this information is is um you know curable through the API uh which is great so you don't have to just come in here and do it you can pull this information out um at your leisure um going through here you know we talked a little bit about the provisioning um the provisioning and the templates there's a whole bunch in here and again we're just not going to have time to cover it but within the provisioning You' set up you know different Hardware that you're deploying on uh the different um installation media that you might be using so you might have the 9.4 isos uh and then the operating systems that you're you're creating with and within the operating systems how you're partitioning the disc the packages that are being installed all that kind of stuff I talked a little bit about the uh root templates that we have in here U this would where we' set up those provisioning partition and sync templates that we would use for Building Systems uh the compliance portion like open scap uh stuff will be in here your policies I don't think there's anything there might be one or two that are in here but your policies you just in you know import upload a new compliance policy and then can run it against a a host collection um you know to get the report there um configur the same thing here um configuring for host groups are more for the provisioning things and the discovery rules as well um we do have anable tie-ins and that could be a whole other discussion uh your your inventory uh upload and your insights is I'm just going to quickly get on this one um we don't have a lot I don't have good dummy data uh to to show you know recommendations that would would come up and if we have time I can always uh go out to the console and get some more information in here but this is where you'd get your recommendations on uh for Red Hat insights um and you can it's um the nice thing is is that now with the new registration process um that we've added in a little while ago we can get insight's client installed automatically on the client itself when we register and then it will basically use the satellite server as its proxy rather than having to go directly out so um infrastructure infrastructure is the same things so this is kind of where we do things for uh the DNS and DHCP creating new subnets and networks uh for for doing new deployments you don't have to use satellite uh satellites DHCP or DNS you can tie in uh was it blue cat or blue coat um you know some some thirdparty IP management system um but that's where all this kind of stuff goes so that's kind of uh The highle Rundown I wanted to get through all the content the content there's just a lot just under content it's I mean we've been on that for maybe 20 minutes at this point and we barely scratched the surface so uh there's a ton of information there but um guys did you want to add anything before we move to the the life cycle stuff no I think that was a great overview um Eric do you do you have any other um not really on this side I mean it just goes to show that you package management is is satellites bread and butter and uh there's just so much to cover there's so much to talk about um I'm not sure how we're even going to put a dent in Satellite even with a six episode miniseries much less an hourong live stream today um but one of the problems that we we see uh we see users uh having satellite to fix most often is not just to have all these packages available uh there there's some conversation going on in the chat about uh using satellite to pull down uh packages on an as-needed basis and so that that way you're not downloading you know 40,000 packages that you may only use 1,200 of and and that's that's where satellite really comes in into play but it it goes a Step Beyond that you can actually create uh these views for uh life cycle environments so a lot of a lot of organizations in in my days there's there's DEA there was there was Dev there's test um some sort of QA or staging environment production then you end up with with other environments like Dr or maybe maybe you had a maybe you had a a warm site or something where where things were up and running but you didn't have the DNS pointed that that direction so being able to classify systems into these into different stages of their life cycle really adds a lot of power to to what satellite does and that's that's what we want to lean into next yeah absolutely it's um it it makes you know with Linux there's there's always there there's 50 different ways to do things right I mean and and if you wanted to do it yourself you know I swear I've had customers that are like you know we want to do it the the difficult way because it's a challenge and you know God bless them I'm I'm kind of that way like I like the challenge I want to see if I can do it even even though I'm basically Reinventing the wheel right um but then there's there's other things like satellite that will help you do some of these things without having to reinvent the wheel and just make your lives easier I know you know as a P CIS engineer it's like you only had so many hours in the day and most of it was taken up by you know dealing with either complaints or frustrations from from users because the boxes is slow and they want more memory right you know those those kinds of things so um let's get into let's get into the the kind of the meat and potatoes of the live stream here today which is the life cycle environments and this is this is where uh a lot of us will live um like I said life cycle environments and these life cycle environment paths are basically uh ways to um you know curtail that that chaos that the packaging chaos um you can create as many of these as you want although that's not a challenge um that's just a there's no hard you know constraints around it well I'm sure there is theoretically because I'm sure somebody's gonna post it in the chat ah you can only do 1,24 or whatever it is but um you know you can you can have multiple different environments for different application life cycles and system life cycles so you're not limited to to to just what you see here as I alluded to earlier you have this library and this is kind of the default organizational view that people are subscribed to by default um using the word in the definition is always helpful um but this Library here that you see is basically has everything so it's got all your yum r yum repositories all the packages or module streams all that kind of stuff that's where things are going to live by default now everything moves off the library itself when we create a new environment and you'll kind of see that here but um you know this is one that we had had established uh previously for our own Tams within our lab and this kind of resembles U most common environments that customers will have you know you've got a Dev and you've got a QA and a stress and then a prod I set up one that was separate but you can you know you can create you can you can add a new environment off this so if you want it to do like you know the prior environment is production you wanted to do super production you know you could you can certainly do that and you can kind of interject it wherever uh in there and you can have it uh as long as you want um and if you wanted to create another environmental path it's exactly what you would do here you would just create a new one it would plop down here and then you can use that and you'll see where all these kind of show up when we do the content views and the activation keys and we'll get to that in just a minute um but you know your your life cycle environment path really determine what content they're going to get what what uh what content views we assign to them so for example your development uh environment will have vastly different repositories than your superr um your superr may have maybe stuck on a more stable version of row it may be on 8.6 EOS at this point okay and your development may be on 8.9 and as the application matures and goes through its life you will promote those to where your super prod or production whatever you have will now be 8.9 or 8.99 us and your development environment may now be provided 9.4 uh packages so and anything in between and the way that we we kind of carve up the repositories and what kind of content we want to serve up to the systems in them is uh in your content views here so we've got content views here and we can see some content views that I already created um and one typical one that you may may may have is um let's see here this uh CV osr 8 um one that I've got created you can see uh on the right hand side you can see it's latest version and you can see the environment that say actually in so if you go here uh and we can look at the repositories that have been assigned to them um you can see the different versions and you know things change as we add more uh packages as they go but we can see the repositories that are added in there and we can see that these you know we're using the supplementary and the base8 now as I said earlier the base8 is basically going to be a link to whatever the latest greatest is for uh the real minor version that you're you're in so for this case it's going to L be linked to 89 so it's going to have everything for 89 and back in there which is why you've got 36,000 uh 241 RPM packages um let me step out of here and if you wanted to add uh you know uh make changes to this you could you could simply go in here and choose another repository and click add the repository now the important thing to remember is unless you click this publish new version you are not going to be able to see it in your environment even if it's in that environment that you promoted to so even if this was a previous version in let's say development if you don't publish a new version the systems that are are in that life cycle environment are never going to see it um this little promote button is is that when we get to an environment if we want to push this to Dev or any other environment that's how we would do it but that's something to keep in mind there um so let's um uh let's go back to here so if we want to use these these content views and we want to apply the repositories to a specific system okay how do we do that well we do that with activation keys and um I'm going to create a quick activation key and where we're going to register to A system that doesn't have any repositories at this point um the reason why I've created the content views ahead of time is sometimes with the size of the repositories they can take a little while rather than having a couple minutes of dead air and just talking about certain things I wanted to have them ready for you guys uh so I'm going to create this uh this is going to be for Dev all right and I like to start things off with a with a name convention oh there's that menu we were talking about earlier um and you can see your different environments and I want this to be in development and then when we go to development we can see only a certain amount of content views because they've been uh published and promoted to just that environment if I go to production I'm only going to see this content view so just as a heads up um you're only going to see what you've actually published or promoted to so we want to use this one we want to use the uh the OS to a OS click save here this will create it real quickly for us we can do a bunch of different stuff here um the release version you can leave separate uh but this is a gotcha kind of moment um if you don't have this set correctly or you start you know kind of messing with it and you have a Content view that's not pushing um a cont of view that's not it doesn't match up with your release flag you're going to get a 404 uh when you're try and do your your repository sync so uh for this I just leave it on eight you can leave it blank it makes no difference there uh we can see the content view that the systems that could be registered to now for you those of you that have been around for a long time you know this was typically how we used to register systems and you still can um you'd have to pull down the the catell ca consumer uh package uh manually there's some other manual steps but we did add um some new stuff within here and before I get out of this activation key I just want to show the repository sets um because there is a slight gotcha here as well um I'm going to click this to limit to the environment for for the environment that it's in uh but you'll notice that if it's not one of these base repositories it's going to disable it by default and we'll have to do an override action and I believe that came in within a last few uh minor versions of satellite but we'll have to override to enable here um for it to to show up or else you're going to end up being like where is my third repository so just something to keep in mind there um so uh if we want to attach this activation key to a a Content host and register it we're going to go over here to host and click register host and this gives us a whole lot more options than we used to have um outside of just doing it kind of the old version and and keep in mind the older versions are deprecate deprecated at this point um you know you can still do it but at some point they will go away but we can do a lot more things we can do organizational location specifications um we can do uh enabling you know setting up the SSH keys for remote execution as well as setting up insights which is very very cool um I'm going to click no just to to speed this along here and we can do a whole bunch of other stuff if you're doing um automation you're going to want to kind of click this to unlimited uh because for now the token life is only going to last for four hours um the activation key we're going to choose the activation key that we just created which is this uh akore Devore Saget um the life cycle environment I don't need to specify because I'm using the activation key the activation key pretty much does the configuration for the host it tells us you know the the content view that we're going to be in the life cycle that we're going to be in and in turn the repositories and the content that we're getting um I'm going to do a force uh on here and then I'm going to do insecure um uh just because it's going to fail out um because we don't have the the certificate installed here but I'm going to copy this here I'm going to console real quick trying to be mindful of time for everybody uh this is just a base uh I think this is base 88 or 89 system that I have um and really you can see the old kind of way that's in here you know that we used to with the subscription manager register but you've got your activation key for that we're going to use enforce and a few of the other options and we're going to run this regist a and assuming I didn't break something earlier um it should go all as planned um while that's running I am wondering if I want to go back to it if it's oh no okay it's running running pretty quick guys so and while we're waiting for this to to complete there was a comment from from William about um automating this process of you know promoting content views Etc so just want to bring up we do have a satellite anible collection for for managing you know a lot of aspects of satellite so that's a really good option to be able to automate you know a lot of these these processes related to content views and whatnot yeah 100% that's the beautiful thing about this is is you can kind of you you can be so descriptive about how your environment looks that especially with things like your Dev environment you can have that expectation set with your developers that hey Dev every Sunday at 2 am is going to get the latest patches so just just beware and you know try not to leave your work open over the weekends uh uh but then you can also kind of pre-stage a lot of those changes if if for instance you you want to prepare for a patching window you can go ahead and pre-populate a lot of those packages for production ahead of time so that you can when the maintenance window opens you can bring every all bring down all your workloads and then just go in and start um start deploying packages through satellite or even schedule that uh which makes it really really helpful yeah um yeah I wish I had time to time to talk about the the anible portion too but I mean even just doing this we're we're kind of running short on time um you know a lot of people wonder there there's you know discussions and this is obviously where Tams uh come in uh for those that maybe don't have Tams uh on their their accounts um you know we we kind of give you know technical guidance and and advisory status to our customers in terms of some of these things and and one of the areas is like content view should I have one large content view should I have multiple content views that are broken out there's pluses and minuses to those um a lot of that we have documented uh on the portal and we kind of give a breakdown as to why you'd want a really big one why you'd want it to be broken out um generally you don't want to have to be managing more cattle so to speak which is like content views and activation keys um so sometimes keeping it really simple is easier but keeping in mind that if you have a really large content view um you're going to it's going to take longer to publish uh because you've got to go through all those changes um okay perfect so now uh we're we're registered here and we can quickly do a oops we can do uh subcription manager status and sea is reporting that it doesn't need an entitlement and I want to see um all right so we do subscription manager identity and we can see here that uh the name of the system the or name the orig ID that it's in and then more uh pertinently we've got the environment name and see we can see that it's in the development life cycle and it's using this content view so we know exactly where uh its content is coming from there's no guesswork and if we do a a yum repo list and of course my typing skills go down once people start watching it's kind of like shorting gears cat um we can we can see the the repositories that are getting pulled so it's pulling this initial initial metal metadata just like you would when you were uh just registering to rhn and we can see all the packages here including the the supplementary RPMs that we just did the override on and if we do an up toate or dnf up toate rather um you'll see that it'll now be able to pull down the packages and everything is hunky dory which we're not going to do because I think everybody has seen a update screen before so we're going to I don't think I have no I I mean we can run it you know if you want to stay after class we can certainly do it um the other thing I wanted to really briefly talk about here is composite content views keep it in mind again we've only got about nine minutes here but composite content views are um because you can only have one content view assigned to an activation and to to the uh host itself so how do we get let's just say you know rather than having one really big content view we kind of break it out and have smaller content views that are reusable in certain environments right so if uh we are building on 8.6 or 88 in development but we also use 86 or 88 in uh production uh we can create just a regular uh CV like this CV uh OS R 8.6 and we can add it to a composite content view um and composite content views are basically just a container for other content views and here um let see here this is the one that I created and you can kind of see the the nomenclature that I used for for for doing this I like to have this the what it is in front of everything it keeps it nice and tidy um but you can see the um the content View that we're using and we can kind of we can make changes individually to these content views and then when a change is made to one of these content views it'll auto update uh or Auto publish the changes to the composite content view that it's that it's in but here we we wanted you know for Dev we want we've got our base 08 which a lot of environments may use but then because it's Dev we wanted to add the Apple repositories and because it's the application Maybe we're using you know the data path uh RPMs and then that way we can assign multiple um multiple uh um uh you know content views uh to it so if we come over to here and we create a new activation key and we say activation key um Dev let's see here let's do CV and I want this to be in in development and and you can see the composite content view that we created uh and it's going to be the exact same process uh we create the new one and then we can use this content view to register against um register against another host um so you can have you know you can break it out into your bass rail you can ba break it out into you know your application content view so if you had certain uh a third-party custom repository that you were using for your own devel velopment work you'd have a Content view for that um and um so on and so forth and then that way you can kind of find tune and and pick and choose uh what you're using the other thing that we didn't really get into and uh I want to touch real briefly on is are filters uh filters you know we we're doing some really basic stuff with the content views but filters are really where um we get um really get into the the the nitty-gritty you know we can create content or we can create uh filters on our content views based on things like RPM um or package group or AATA by date range so if you do patching by let's say monthly and you want everything from the date from the first day after you last patch to 30 days from now and nothing more you can create that filter and just do an include and it will exclude everything else or or if there's a problem package let's say you really don't like HTTP and you're a big engine X fan you can filter out and limit HTTP and put engine X in um and you know promote that through your guys environment and make changes based on that and it doesn't just have to be on on on package groups or RPMs you know one thing is is that you saw all the packages that are in those repositories if you just want to do it on the the basic server package group you can just do that and limit everything else um there's some there's some other gotas in terms of like filters on making sure when you do when you exclude everything is it I think it's if you exclude everything it's not going to do the dependency checks um so then you got to kind of really do a lot of testing and things like that but there's a lot of power within the um filter out emac yes um there's a lot ofil filter or power in the filters yeah just just an example too like say um there were a few packages you wanted to provide from eple or or some other you know repository like that you could you could you know include just those specific packages and not provide access to everything else in eple so you can really get you know really granular control over what you're making available to be installed on on systems in your environment it's really really cool yeah um you know speaking of like EOS like we're I think we're going to do we're going to do a quick EOS for r eight here just so I can kind of show you the the content view portion since we're at the end and we've got a little bit of of time here but you know a common thing is is like your production servers like we talked about they're going to have a much more stable um you know set of set of packages um and uh you know doing that is is adding your your your EOS repositories let's just say here so um real quick we'll do on the live here um and of course it's always I always got to up this to like 50 because I can't see anything um let's see here tick tick tick okay um where is all right we're going to do um let's say I wanted uh 8.6 for Eos so I choose base um base OS for 8 de6 and I'm looking for the appst stream for it uh no that's 86 here's the appst stream for 8.6 okay great so we've got the appstream we've got the base OS and we want to put this to our production uh environment so we've got those two repositories we're going to add those repositories to this content view that we just created and we want to push this to all the systems that are registered in the production or super production life cycle environment um so you can see that they're added now we're going to publish it so we publish it and like I said uh when we publish it it doesn't mean that the system are going going going to get that yet it just means it's it's kind of available for use here we've got to promote it also to that environment now I'm going to kind of do an oopsy here and go directly to prod and it's going to tell you it's out of order oops not that prod this prod there we go um it's going to tell you it's out of order but I'm going to promote this and anything that's registered using this activation key is going to get these new channels and so we're going to do a finish and it's going to hopefully click away pretty quick as this is running I mean clearly we've barely scratched the surface today um and there's there's just so much more to talk about and there's there's so many tangents and rabbit holes we could we could go down so I I know we've got an upcoming episode here in a few months uh I think uh I think another Tam actually came and and suggested uh some some ideas for demos for satellit so I'm excited for uh I'm excited for that and of course a miniseries coming up I believe Mr Richard Rios is hanging out with us in chat he'll uh he'll be co-hosting that with me so there's just so much to do and in fact I'm kind of thinking this might be having a miniseries might actually be the excuse I need to finally rebuild my broken satellite server here here here in my home lab yeah yeah it's um there there's just a ton and when we just talk about the patching component of it I mean we say it's just patching right but there's so much to it especially for people that maybe aren't in the industry or maybe don't do it um on a regular basis they think it's a you just apply the patches well no not really and there's a lot more to it and inevitably you know the application team is going to be like I can't have this package in here even though it's on 88 or 89 I cannot have it be deployed to the system because there's a there's a problem with it you know and you got to go come in there and you don't have to just add repositories to content views you can create a filter and the only change to that content view is a filter you know for that version and you publish that new version to the environment um and you can do that so um let's get our activation key now that we've got this thing all created and create a new activation key and we're going to do um activation key um D or wait prod uh us and we're going to do superr content view here's a Content view that we just created and there we go now I will do this and I think you can still run this after if you've if you've already registered the box once it's going to have the necessary thing so you can technically still run the description manager register because it's going to have your rhsm uh configuration uh conf figured uh for it so you don't have to do the the register content if you've been messing around with systems or they're they're already registered but this is um oh yeah my bad I guess uh it's not never mind um let me see here register host okay we're going to do this real again real quick here and register the system insecure Advanced and well you know what we'll do the we'll do this just because it's going to be the last one here activation key uh P us there we go uh generate copy this in making sure I'm on the right terminal this time because I accidentally ran this on my laptop which is fun to fix all right you can kind of see here um as we're running that it's actually looking for that old K CA consumer uh package to mark for removal um but it's going to go through the exact same process except this time um it's also going to register for insights automatically um and set that up which is really really nice you know before you would have to yep here it runs is um oops let me see here uh looks like I bork something classic way to end a end a demo right guys um let's see here okay there we go um so super prod is the environment name that it's on and then you can see that content view that it got established and then assuming uh we have this working correctly you will see uh oops you know what guys I think I made the mistake the the classic mistake of not overriding it in the activation key you think that's what I did I totally Miss missed doing that see look at that you do it enough live and you make the same mistake that you just told your viewers heads up you may run into this saying is that was built into the demo built yes oh you know what you've done this before haven't you Eric that's really good cover see I'm not I'm not versed in in in coia here right uh uh but yeah I just I just made that mistake right for your guys benefit is the enable override uh which is why it wasn't uh it wasn't getting it um so yeah um and then I think we can just do a refresh right guys oops uh nope do I have to run the registration command again nothing like a good old force that doesn't fix things right gentlemen you you never know what you're going to get when you when you run a live stream so you kind of learn certain things you can do to like like audience is getting bonus content here I mean yes I mean this is this is how you troubleshoot satellite issues yeah I didn't uh you know you guys don't know how lucky you are I suppose right but uh here we can see the uh the repo so now we're all we're basically getting the um you know real 8 um EOS for uh for 8.6 so for your production environment so you can kind of see you know we create different content views for different uh environments in your life cycle paths based on the stage that they're in and you know as we've kind of alluded to this entire time we spent an hour and we've scratched you know 5% of the surface of satellite and and and patching in general and the things that you can do and the the trouble that you can get in um so um I'm hoping you know this kind of kind of gives an Enlightenment to to how to use a satellite at least to get started with it and get you get you playing with it and toy with it and seeing all the things that it can do awesome yeah I really appreciate the uh the walkthrough this this was more of a guided tour than any specific uh type of workflows so here here in a couple months we'll have an episode around satellite and that will probably be our kickoff for the miniseries uh I forget who we've got lined up as a guest for that episode um I'm got like six other projects in my brain right now so apologies there but uh keep an eye out on our YouTube channel for that uh episode coming up speaking of coming uh events coming up we mentioned satellite 6.15 is now GA rail 9.4 is now ga uh we mentioned that 8.10 uh will be out in the next week or so I forget exactly when that's when that's due but uh but it'll be coming out here in the very very near future so keep an eye out on uh on redhe Hat's website or on social media to to know when that drops um also go ahead and and click on the QR code to join the Discord link I think like five or six more people join during the episode live so uh definitely a growing Community people just asking questions just hanging out and chatting after the episode uh in fact what I'm hoping to do is uh once Summit is over and I I actually have a full night sleep again um my my hope is to have uh post episode Hangouts so we'll we'll jump off the air we'll we'll jump over to Discord we we'll we'll kick up a we'll start up a video room and just kind of hang out and chat maybe maybe some additional content maybe get some questions answered or just generally hang out and and shoot the breze so really excited to see how that Community will grow um of course you can also find us all over the Internet things like Twitter LinkedIn uh Reddit we've got a growing presence on the red hat subreddit so plenty of places to get engaged with redhead uh Enterprise Linux and uh folks like peeps who is a tam uh technical account manager I believe last year probably we had an episode about a day in the life of a tam so go go and check that um links and additional information will be available in the show notes um so coming up uh closing thought uh coming up we have red hat Summit next week Brian and I will be there along with dozens of our closest Red Hat friends uh so if you're there uh be sure to drop by the rail Booth there'll be swag there'll be demo stations there'll be some some chances toh to hang out a lot of special events uh Red Hat Summit was one of the highlights of the year um it's one of those things Brian I don't know about you I don't know about you Pete but it's one of those things that I always dread leading up to it as especially like in this particular moment because all of a sudden I have like two or three more presentations that I didn't know about until Friday so it's just like we don't but but that flight out there kind of resets and it's it's a great time yeah I wish I wish I I wish I could join you guys you know that'd be great we don't uh we don't get the get the opportunity as Tams to go out that often there there is a lot of redhead people I know when we have um a large contingent of our customers that come some of us Tams do get to go or if we present but um when I have gotten to go to Summit I mean it's great I love love that week it's just awesome so so many great people so much information great speeches and topics things to learn it's just it's just awesome and of course there'll be tons of Focus content uh a lot of stuff around Red Hat Red Hat insights as well um they'll in fact there is at least one if not two Satellite Labs at Summit so if you're going to Summit and you want to learn more about satellite try and sign up for one of those labs they do fill up quickly so make sure rsap to one of those sessions as quickly as possible um as far as live streams obviously uh all of the live streaming team will be traveling next week for Summit um so there will be no episode a week from Friday of uh into the terminal and then we'll be taking a week off from this show and we should be having an episode two weeks from today uh we're we went ahead and canceled that just trying to come back home and recover from from Summit uh we we didn't want to try and put together an episode and and have it be subpar just from exhaustion or lack of planning or what not so Bri and are going to take a week off and then we'll be back at it here in a few weeks I don't have a topic lined up yet but there are so many announcements coming at Red Hat Summit um that I'm really excited to uh we we've got episodes and guests lined up to talk about some of those new features um so really a lot to be excited about so definitely uh hit the Subscribe button uh if you haven't already uh that way you get uh that way shows up in your feed regularly and and hit that Bell so you get notified whenever we go live we've got the uh the ra product update coming up uh week after next it's Tuesday Morning uh us time so make sure to join that I'll be uh be giving a presentation on uh on real 9.4 and new features and there'll be a lot of us hanging out in chat so uh plenty of opportunity to ask questions about 9.4 and some of the new features there Brian I feel like I'm forgetting anything I feel like I'm forgetting something or maybe everything no I think I think you covered covered it all thanks so much Pete for for being our guest today yeah fun thanks guys for having me yeah this was this was a great time and uh I I learned a few things about satellite getting getting prepared for this episode so definitely appreciate you coming tell tell your Tam friends that we're always looking for new new content new topics and and certainly new new people to embarrass on air as their demos explode oh you guys were nice and we've we've all been there all right folks thank you all for joining us and uh and really appreciate uh really appreciate you joining us in in chat and and for those of you that are watching after the fact please use the comments we check it every day or every two days um and we try to answer your questions I know Scott mcbrien is usually uh answering questions before I even get logged into YouTube for the day so plenty of opportunities to interact with us thank you all very much and on behalf of our guest Pete Brian Smith and the entire redhe hat Enterprise Linux team thank you all very much and if we don't see you at Summit we'll see you in a few weeks
