Administration of Red Hat Desktop

The Red Hat Desktop distribution is based on Red Hat Enterprise 3. Like all other 

products in this range, the mechanism for administration and update is Red Hat 

Network (RHN).

Red Hat offers three architectures for connecting to RHN: Hosted, Proxy and 

Satellite. Usually a client will connect directly to the RHN servers at Red Hat. 

This is called the Hosted architecture. Included in the Red Hat Desktop offering 

are the Proxy and Satellite architectures, where you can install a RHN proxy or 

RHN satellite server locally. The RHN proxy server caches traffic and content 

between the RHN servers at Red Hat and the local client. Using a satellite server 

it is possible to replicate a RHN server locally. 

The proxy and satellite servers are useful when the number of clients increases 

and the traffic to Red Hat becomes large. Also these solutions will increase 

security because there is a limited connectivity to the Internet. An added 

advantage of the satellite server is that the RHN solution can be taken off line 

(disconnected from the Internet) if desired.

Updating and patching the RHD client is done using up2date. The RHN alert 

notification tool is used to alert the end user that an update or patch is available. 

The update process can also be automated.

Using RHN there are three types of modules:

Update

Management

Provisioning

These modules determine the service level you get from RHN.

The Update module only gives you basic update capabilities like: 

Access to a Web interface to manage the systems.

Priority e mail notification of new updates and errata.

Errata information gives you a list of all available errata updates for each 

system.

RPM dependency checking makes sure that every applied update gets all 

necessary dependencies.

Auto update lets a system download and install errata and updates 

autonomically.

The Management module gives you all capabilities of the Update module plus 

you get extended management capabilities: 

You can group systems, to manage them as a group. 

 Chapter 4. Technical planning 

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