Red Hat Network is a family of systems management services operated by Red Hat

Red Hat

Red Hat, Inc. is an S&P 500 company in the free and open source software sector, and a major Linux distribution vendor. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina with satellite offices worldwide....

 that makes updates, patch

Patch (computing)

A patch is a piece of software designed to fix problems with, or update a computer program or its supporting data. This includes fixing security vulnerabilities and other bugs, and improving the usability or performance...

es, and bug fixes of packages included within Red Hat Linux

Red Hat Linux

Red Hat Linux, assembled by the company Red Hat, was a popular Linux based operating system until its discontinuation in 2004.Red Hat Linux 1.0 was released on November 3, 1994...

 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a Linux-based operating system developed by Red Hat and targeted toward the commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86, x86-64, Itanium, PowerPC and IBM System z, and desktop versions for x86 and x86-64...

 available to subscribers. Other available features include the deployment of custom content to, and the provisioning, configuration, reporting, monitoring of client systems.

Users of these operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

s can then invoke the up2date

Up2date

up2date, also known as the Red Hat Update Agent, is a tool used by older versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS and Fedora Core that downloads and installs new software and upgrades the operating system. It functions as a front-end to the RPM Package Manager and adds advanced features such as...

 or yum program to download and install updates from RHN. The updates portion of RHN is akin to other types of automatic system maintenance tools such as Microsoft Update for Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 operating systems. The system requires a subscription to allow access to updates. In Fedora

Fedora (operating system)

Fedora is a RPM-based, general purpose collection of software, including an operating system based on the Linux kernel, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat...

, updates are provided by Red Hat's free yum and Advanced Packaging Tool

Advanced Packaging Tool

The Advanced Packaging Tool, or APT, is a free user interface that works with core libraries to handle the installation and removal of software on the Debian GNU/Linux distribution and its variants...

 repositories.

On June 18, 2008 Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst

Jim Whitehurst

Jim Whitehurst is the Chief Executive Officer at Red Hat. Prior to that, he was a Chief Operating Officer of Delta Air Lines. Whitehurst was tapped by former Delta CEO Gerald Grinstein to lead the airline out of bankruptcy and played a critical role in Delta's battle for survival against the...

 announced plans for the RHN Satellite software to be open-sourced following the Fedora/RHEL model. Subsequently, project Spacewalk

Spacewalk (software)

Spacewalk is open source systems management software developed by Red Hat. It is the upstream version of the RHN Satellite Server, which was open sourced in 2008. Spacewalk includes the web interface and back-end, as well as RHN Proxy Server and associated client software of Satellite and makes...

 was launched.

Architecture

In the basic subscription model the information about a managed host is stored on Red Hat's servers, and updates get downloaded directly from those servers as well. For an organization that manages multiple machines this is inefficient bandwidth-wise. Red Hat offers a proxy server

Proxy server

In computer networks, a proxy server is a server that acts as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers. A client connects to the proxy server, requesting some service, such as a file, connection, web page, or other resource available from a different server...

 (Red Hat Network Proxy) that once installed at a site allows machines to securely download updates locally. Advanced lifecycle management

Application lifecycle management

Application Lifecycle Management is a continuous process of managing the life of an application through governance, development and maintenance...

; provisioning features, like bare metal PXE boot provisioning; and monitoring features (e.g. centralized CPU and disk usage) cannot be done over the Internet to the hosted RHN servers. These features require a RHN Satellite Server running locally. the RHN Proxy Server costs $2,500 annually, and the RHN Satellite Server costs $13,500 annually, which includes the license for the embedded Oracle Database

Oracle Database

The Oracle Database is an object-relational database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation....

.

History

• 2001 - Red Hat Network, the hosted service, is born
• late 2001 - RHN Proxy Server
• February 2002 - RHN Satellite server
• June 18, 2008 - RHN Satellite (and Proxy) is open source'd. Project Spacewalk is born.

External links

• Red Hat Network (login to the hosted RHN application)
• RHN Satellite
• Project Spacewalk