Last year when I went to Red Hat Summit, I saw a lot of use of Satellite. I’d tried the 5.x series’ upstream Spacewalk and it didn’t quite work out for me. But this time I would try it out, gosh darnit! I mean, with the Katello plugin it would even include Pulp, which I’d been interested in trying out before because it could cache RPMs during an upgrade. So I’ve been messing with it here and there. However,I don’t use Puppet scripts (it’s like Chef or Ansible in principle) and I don’t have the need to provision new machines or VMs (especially when that’s already pretty easy with Cockpit and/or Virt-Manager). It’s already easier and works more consistently for me to keep track of whether my computers are up to date (and update them if not) with Cockpit. The RPM caching part of it was neat, but recently it stopped working consistently. Upgrades are VERY fragile and messing up on installing a plugin could bork the whole system. Also the necessary files – puppet, katello-agent, etc were always behind in providing packages for Fedora. Turns out it was a bunch of extra work and frustration just to keep track of my computers – and I was already doing that in Dokuwiki.

So, farewell Katello and Foreman. It was fun to play with your technology because I’m a big computer nerd and found that fun. But there’s only so much time for sys-admin-ing and so after I get everyone unsubscribed and back on their usual repos, I’ll be getting rid of you.