* Full release notes can be found here (Please read before installing): https://fedorahosted.org/katello/wiki/ReleaseNotes13

* For fresh installations, please use steps from: https://fedorahosted.org/katello/wiki/Install

* To upgrade your installation, please follow steps from: https://fedorahosted.org/katello/wiki/Upgrade

The download locations are

http://fedorapeople.org/groups/katello/releases/yum/1.3/RHEL/6Server/x86_64/
http://fedorapeople.org/groups/katello/releases/yum/1.3/Fedora/18/x86_64/

with client repositories under:

http://fedorapeople.org/groups/katello/releases/yum/1.3-client/RHEL/6Server/x86_64/
http://fedorapeople.org/groups/katello/releases/yum/1.3-client/Fedora/18/x86_64/

Major features and changes:
* Content Views
Allow you to create different ‘views’ or ‘spins’ of your content with filtering rules.
* Upgraded software stack to Ruby 1.9.3/Rails 3
Utilizing the Ruby 193 Software Collection to bring these technologies to RHEL 6 without overriding the locally installed ruby.
* Now using Pulp 2.1
* Repository Discovery within the UI
More Info: http://www.katello.org/new-feature-repository-discovery/
* Faster Manifest Import
From as long as 40 minutes to as little as 7 seconds.
* Repo publishing over HTTP (available in http://HOSTNAME//pulp/repos)
* Custom Info key/values for systems
* Custom Info defaults for systems at the organization level
* Set default System SLA for Organizations

I would like to thank all the users and developers that have helped contribute to this release!

• http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5Server/i386/
• http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5Server/x86_64/
• http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5Server/ppc/
• http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6Server/x86_64/

Previously with Katello, the user had to create each repository individually.  Creating one repo in Katello may not be time consuming, but creating 10 can be quite tedious, until now!

Repository Discovery is now in the nightly builds of Katello and will be released with Katello 1.3.

• Crawl a web server or file system and look for yum repositories
• Easily create multiple repositories based off discovered yum repos.
• Create these repositories in an existing product, or create a new product on the fly.

Screenshots:

The initial Repository Discovery page allowing the user to scan any web url or file url.

After entering the base epel 6 directory and hitting “Discover”, a list of repositories are quickly returned.

A filter box is available for easy filtering of results.

After selecting both repositories from my filter,  and clicking ‘Create Within Product’, the user is presented with this screen.  An existing product can be selected, or a new product can be created.  Here I have elected to create a new product and given it the name “Epel i386″.  Names and labels have been prepopulated for my selected repositories, but I can customize them if i wish.  Upon clicking ‘Create Repositories’, the product and repositories are created in real time.

The user is returned to the base Repository Discovery screen, and the repositories that already exist are indicated with a check mark.  Hovering over the check mark will give context about what product and repository that repo url has been created in.

The best workaround is to disable XML param parsing feature entirely. To do this, place the following snippet inside the application initializer:

ActionDispatch::ParamsParser::DEFAULT_PARSERS.delete(Mime::XML)

If you installed Katello od Fedora 16 or 17, wait until update is ready and immediately update the system. At the moment packages are being submitted for delivery: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=893281

If you installed Katello on RHEL6, wait until we update rails packages and then update the system. You can remove the workaround after update.

#name: Migrate candlepin database
#apply: katello headpin
#run: always
#description:
#This step calls Candlepin cpdb utility to upgrade database schema
#in postgresql database to the latest version.

CANDLEPIN_HOME=${CANDLEPIN_HOME:-/usr/share/candlepin}

pushd $CANDLEPIN_HOME >/dev/null
./cpdb –update 2>&1
ret_code=$?
popd >/dev/null

exit $ret_code
Each script has a fancy name and description, which is presented to the user either in interactive or non-interactive mode. Users can make decisions and skip steps or completely suspend the upgrade process at any step if needed.

Katello can operate in two modes: “katello” and “headpin”. The latter is something we call katello-light – it does not have all features installed. For upgrades, we do not want to execute particular steps. We set the apply header only to “katello” for those.

The last but not least is run header field. It indicates if we want to run the step every upgrade, or only once. Scripts that has been executed are recorded in a text file and never executed again if they was marked as “once”.
# cat /var/lib/katello/upgrade-history
0099_preallocate_mongo.sh
0720_create_foreman_users.rb
Our installer, katello-configure, is written in Puppet. The first idea was to write the installation process in pure Puppet, but after experiences with bad ordering with older Puppet versions in our installer, we have decided to take this simple approach. In future, we can consider rewriting our upgrade steps as Puppet classes. Until then, we need to execute Puppet at the and of the upgrade to re-deploy all configuration files that has been changed. We do it twice, because our classes sometimes do not fully apply during the first run.
# cat /usr/share/katello/install/upgrade-scripts/0900_katello_configure.sh
#!/bin/bash

#name: Reconfigure with katello-configure
#apply: katello headpin
#run: always
#description:
#This steps calls katello-configure twice to re-deploy configuration
#and restart services. Configuration files are replaced from erb templates
#which are distributed as part of katello-configure package. Make sure you
#have backup of all configuration files if you made any changes in it.

# do it twice – in rare cases configuration file changes needs two runs
katello-configure -b –answer-file=/etc/katello/katello-configure.conf && \
katello-configure -b –answer-file=/etc/katello/katello-configure.conf
Katello is easy to upgrade with this tool, it has nifty manual page and help screen:
# katello-upgrade -h
Katello upgrade script
Usage: /sbin/katello-upgrade [options]
-a, --autostop Automatically stop services using "katello-service stop"
-y, --assumeyes Work non-intearactively and proceed without asking
-n, --dryrun Prints the upgrade steps without modifying anything
-q, --quiet Do not print anything on the stdout/stderr (only log)
--describe Only describe all the upgrade steps without modifying anything
--trace Print exception stacktrace on error
--noservicecheck Do not check if all services are stopped (use with care)
--norootcheck Disable check for root (use with care)
--deployment=DEPLOYMENT Force deployment mode (use with care)
-h, --help Show this short summary
Go ahead and upgrade your Katello instance today!

Links
Katello: http://www.katello.org
Puppet: http://www.puppetlabs.com

Since our motto in Katello is to provide an API that lets you do more or less the same things you can do through the Web UI, there is quite a lot of entry points that can be used for scripting and integrating with other services. So we faced the problem of documenting the entirety of the API so that it can be used without need to go through the server/client code and guess how to use the API (though the fact that we are open-source makes the things a bit simpler:).

Katello as such is a Rails application. And although there is vital ecosystem around this framework there is a lack of documentation tools. Therefore we tried to give something back to the open-source community in form of a library that lets you document Rails API’s easily. And that’s how Apipie-rails emerged. By that time, we’ve also got in touch with Pajk: a student interested in getting involved in open-source, so we connected the forces for this purpose.

In short, this tool allows you to use a DSL to describe your API, generate it from your (not only) unit tests together with examples, generate static pages, validate the requests against the descriptions, use markup language of your choice, generate CLI and bindings to your API and more. The central idea is that you use code as a documentation tool. And this helps us keep the documentation up to date.

Very important thing in the documentation are the examples. Therefore we implemented a way how to extract them from running tests. You can find what the process looks like on our wiki here: .

When writing the documentation, the output is immediately available under /katello/apidoc path. That makes it easy to check formatting (markdown) and quickly see the visual representation. In production however, we want to avoid unneeded rendering and dependencies. Therefore when preparing the production code, there is a way to generate a cache. We ship the documentation as a separate RPM. And to complete the automation, we use a script to get the latest available documentation RPM from our nightly repos and push it directly to our site so that we keep the updates going.

Now that you know all the background behind this, we are happy to announce the availability of the documentation directly from this site.

If you’re interested in using this tool in your project, check a sample Ruby on Rails application to give you an example how this tool can help you with the API documentation. See its README for more info.

Any suggestions are welcome.

PS: really big thanks goes to Pajk for all his work and innovative approach for this tool.

The download locations are

• http://fedorapeople.org/groups/katello/releases/yum/1.1/RHEL
• http://fedorapeople.org/groups/katello/releases/yum/1.1/Fedora

with client repositories under:

• http://fedorapeople.org/groups/katello/releases/yum/1.1-client/RHEL
• http://fedorapeople.org/groups/katello/releases/yum/1.1-client/Fedora

For fresh installations, please use steps from

• https://fedorahosted.org/katello/wiki/Install

To upgrade your installation, please follow steps from

• https://fedorahosted.org/katello/wiki/Upgrade

Features & Enhancements in Katello 1.1

• Initial Foreman packaging integration
• Object labels and auto labelization
• Added –default_locale to CLI for user creation
• Added permissions for content delete
• Adding a new changeset model for Content Deletion
• Allow user to update his/her own localevia cli. Also, output the default locale when using the info parameter.
• Available subscriptions on systems page now allow filtering matching what is available in subscription-manager-gui
• New documentation of API
• Content deletion improvements
• Systems custom info new feature
• Fixed an issue when it was impossible to remove a repository that had no promoted content
• No longer possible to delete a repository if it’s been promoted
• Make string more translator friendly
• Prawn integration for PDF generation
• Corrected i18n strings
• Validation of locale during update handled by model

Notable bug fixes:

• 746765 – Systems can be referenced by UUID
• 825858 – Implementing proxy permissions
• 825858 – Use organizations.label instead of cp_key
• 845995 – Add local and server side checks for passing in bad group names and ids
• 846321 – Support creating permissions for all tags from the API and the CLI
• 853056 – Improve 404 generic error message
• 857576 – Package filter name can be edited by CLI
• 860421 – Not verifying ldap roles for auth-less API calls

Contributors

• Adam Price
• Brad Buckingham
• Bryan Kearney
• David Davis
• Dmitri Dolguikh
• Eric D Helms
• Eric Sammons
• Ivan Necas
• Jan Blažek
• Jakub Hadvig
• Jason E. Rist
• Jordan OMara
• Justin Sherrill
• Lukas Zapletal
• Martin Bačovský
• Mike McCune
• Miroslav Suchý
• Og B. Maciel
• Partha Aji
• Pavel Pokorny
• Petr Chalupa
• Tomas Strachota
• Tom McKay

Our thanks go to the community members who contributed to this release:

• Gerhard Stoeckel
• Chris Alfonso

https://fedorahosted.org/katello/wiki/ContributorList

Some statistics

In Katello 1.1, we’ve seen

• 141 bugs fixed
• 1444 changesets committed
• 1500 commits done

Known Issues

No Fedora 17 build

We are currently working on Fedora 17 port (Ruby 1.9) and we have decided to release Katello 1.1 without support for Fedora 17. As Fedora 16 will be end of life soon, it is recommended to install Katello 1.1 on RHEL6.

Undefined method when adding product to activation key

activation_key update --add_subscription= --name=ak1_xj1yX0rFHXpw --environment=env_rhsm_xj1yX0rFHXpw --org=org_rhsm_xj1yX0rFHXpw
undefined method `[]' for nil:NilClass

No resolution yet.

Reporting errors

To report issues with Katello, please use mailing list katello@lists.fedorahosted.org to reach the user community. We might ask you to file bugzilla at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/enter_bug.cgi?product=Katello with more details or full logs.

Thank you for using Katello.

The first element you’ll notice on the about page is the System Status widget. Red Hat is working on several open-source applications for managing systems in a cloud environment and Katello is the unified user interface (UI) that gives users access to applications like Pulp and Candlepin. As a unified UI,  Katello has to keep track of the status of these components. In the System Status widget, users get a bird’s eye view of what the status is for these different components. If any of these components are not working properly, Katello will show a message that can help the user troubleshoot why the component is failing.

The next widget on the about page is the System Information widget. Katello can be installed on a variety of different systems (Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, etc) so it’s important to know when debugging a problem how Katello is set up on the particular system on which the problem is happening. For the Information widget, you’ll see information like Katello’s version number, where it’s installed, and what environment it’s using.

The other two widgets we’ve added to the page are for Support and Package information. The Support widget contains a link directly to our Bugzilla instance so users can report a bug using the information on the about page. The Package widget shows the Katello-related packages that are installed on the system. When a bug occurs, it’s important to know which packages the user is using because the bug the user is reporting may have already been fixed if the user is using an out-of-date package. Giving users a direct link to our bug tracker and information about their Katello setup should help us to get bugs sooner and fix them faster.

One of the added benefits of the about page is that it also helps in developing Katello. Before doing some work, I like to check the status of my Katello setup and now the about page gives me an easy way to do that without having to use the command line. Going to the about page, I can also see where the app is running from: is it my git copy of the project or my system install? At Red Hat, our most valuable asset is people–our open-source community members, our customers, and our partners. I think each of these groups will find something useful in the new about page feature we’ve added to Katello.

we are happy to announce the first release of Katello, a systems management solution.

The download locations are

http://fedorapeople.org/groups/katello/releases/yum/1.0/RHEL/$releasever/x86_64
http://fedorapeople.org/groups/katello/releases/yum/1.0/Fedora/$releasever/x86_64

with client repositories under:

http://fedorapeople.org/groups/katello/releases/yum/1.0-client/RHEL/$releasever/x86_64
http://fedorapeople.org/groups/katello/releases/yum/1.0-client/Fedora/$releasever/x86_64

For fresh installations, please use steps from

https://fedorahosted.org/katello/wiki/Install

Features & Enhancements in Katello 1.0

* Patch Management
* Mirror content from external repositories into local Definitive Software Library.
* Schedule recurring syncs of content.
* Manage the content through multiple environments.
* Use subscription model to associate content with machines which are registered to environments.

* System Management
* Inventory of systems which are registered, including installed software and system facts.
* Assign subscriptions provided by Red Hat, and customer products.
* Registration Macros with Activation Keys
* Remote installation of packages over AMQP.
* System Grouping for Batch Processing

* General
* LDAP integration.
* Python based CLI.
* REST API

Contributors

Our thanks go to the community members who contributed to this
release:

* Brad P. Crochet
* Jakub Steiner
* Pep Turro Mauri

* https://fedorahosted.org/katello/wiki/ContributorList

You can view the history of Katello from its start to 1.0 at

* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubBI-38qVqI

Some statistics:

In Katello 1.0, we’ve seen

* 624  bugs fixed
* 6011 changesets committed
* 6596 commits done

Known issues: (UPDATE 2012-08-22: fixed)
* registration with activation keys does not work:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=844678

Thank you for using Katello.