1.4 Networking Requirements

The software described in this documentation is either no longer supported or is in extended support.
Oracle recommends that you upgrade to a current supported release.

1.4 Networking Requirements

You must configure a fully-qualified domain name (FQDN) for the Spacewalk server. Spacewalk does not consider .local and .localdomain to be valid domain names. Spacewalk clients must be able to resolve the Spacewalk server's FQDN for both forward and reverse lookups in DNS. If these conditions are not met, neither certificate validation nor PXE booting work and clients cannot register with the Spacewalk server.

Verify that the host name returned by the hostname command and the value of HOSTNAME defined in /etc/sysconfig/network are identical and that this host name is consistent with the FQDN defined for the system in DNS for both forward and reverse lookups, for example:

# hostname
swksvr.mydom.com
# grep HOSTNAME /etc/sysconfig/network
HOSTNAME=swksvr.mydom.com
# host swksvr.mydom.com
swksvr.mydom.com has address 192.168.1.3
# host 192.168.1.3
3.1.168.192.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer swksvr.mydom.com.

Edit /etc/hosts and configure the actual IP address for the FQDN and host name and not the loopback address (127.0.0.1), for example:

127.0.0.1      localhost localhost.localdomain localhost4 localhost4.localdomain4
::1            localhost localhost.localdomain localhost6 localhost6.localdomain6
192.168.1.3    swksvr.mydom.com swksvr

The following table shows the network ports that a Spacewalk server uses, depending on its configuration.

Port/Protocol	Direction	Purpose
69/udp	Inbound	TFTP (if PXE provisioning support is required)
80/tcp	Inbound and outbound	HTTP access
443/tcp	Inbound and outbound	HTTPS access
5222/tcp	Inbound	Push support to Spacewalk clients (if required)
5269/tcp	Inbound	Push support to Spacewalk proxies (if required)

If the Spacewalk server needs to connect though a web proxy, you can configure the web proxy in either of the following ways:

Edit /etc/rhn/rhn.conf and enter the web proxy configuration settings for the server.satellite.http_proxy, server.satellite.http_proxy_username, and server.satellite.http_proxy_password parameters, for example:
```
server.satellite.http_proxy = webproxy.mydom.com:80
server.satellite.http_proxy_username = another
server.satellite.http_proxy_password = clydenw
```
In the Spacewalk web interface:
1. Select the Admin tab, then Spacewalk Configuration, and then General.
2. Enter the web proxy configuration settings in the fields HTTP proxy, HTTP proxy username, HTTP proxy password, and Confirm HTTP proxy password, and then click Update.

Configure the Spacewalk server, proxies, and clients to use network time synchronization mechanism such as the Network Time Protocol (NTP) or Precision Time Protocol (PTP). Spacewalk requires that the system time on these systems are as consistent to within 120 seconds. For example, if the system times (corrected for time zone difference) of the server and a client differ by more than 120 seconds, authentication of the osad service on a client by the jabberd service on the server fails.

For more information, see Oracle® Linux 6: Administrator's Guide.