Release Notes

orcharhino 6.0 is here!

Key Features:

• Extended Content Management with Pulp 3
  • You have to perform a content migration on orcharhino 5.12.2 before you can start the upgrade to orcharhino 6.0. The content migration takes time depending on the size of your content and may last for more than 24 hours. Before starting the content migration, please have a look at the upgrade requirements. We recommend that you run the content migration in advance of your upgrade to orcharhino 6.0. You can use your orcharhino during and after the content migration. For more information, see Upgrading orcharhino Server.
  • Pulp 3 replaces MongoDB with PostgreSQL.
  • Improved overall performance.
  • You can now set the download policy to “On Demand” for APT content.
  • You can now set the download policy to “On Demand” for SUSE content.
  • You can now manage Ansible Collections on Content > Ansible Collections.
  • You can now manage container images using more options.
• orcharhino Proxy content setups
  • orcharhino Proxies provide three different modes to fetch content from orcharhino Server.
  • Navigate to Infrastructure > Smart Proxies to set the download policy to either “On Demand”, “Immediate”, or “Streamed”.
    • “Streamed” replaces the orcharhino 5.12 Proxy “Passthrough” feature. If you do not want to store any packages on orcharhino Proxy and save disk space, select “Streamed”. Please note, that there are some manual steps necessary to upgrade the proxy from 5.12.2.
    • “On Demand” only synchronizes the meta data of the repositories and downloads the packages from orcharhino Server when requested by content hosts. It can take up to two hours to synchronize Debian 9, 10, 11 and Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04, 20.04, 22.04 using the “On Demand” policy to an orcharhino Proxy.
    • “Immediate” synchronizes all packages and meta data immediately from orcharhino Server to orcharhino Proxy.
  • Note that you can still use orcharhino Proxies >=5.12.1 together with orcharhino 6.0.
• Updated open source components
  • orcharhino 6.0 uses Foreman 2.5, Katello 4.1, and Pulp3.
• Webhooks Plugin: We have added the foreman_webhooks to orcharhino 6.0. You can now trigger a user-defined webhook when a specific internal event occurs. For example, you can notify users in chat after a host has been provisioned successfully.
• Restructured orcharhino documentation
  • We have restructured our documentation. All procedures to manage content, provision hosts, and manage and configure hosts are now separated by operating systems.
  • New “Mirroring Policy” for DEB/RPM packages: Mirroring Policy Overview.
  • New “Advanced options” in orcharhino web installer: You can use this, for example, to set a tuning profile or to provide a connection to an external database.
• orcharhino installer
  • You can set advanced options in orcharhino installer to add individual parameters for the foreman-installer run.
  • You can now select both Google GCE and Amazon EC2 as compute resource plugins during the orcharhino installation.
  • We have added an “autoscroll” feature for the orcharhino web installer. Any output during your orcharhino Server installation is now inside a frame with optional autoscrolling.
• orcharhino Management UI
  • We have visually improved buttons and fields to select numbers, items from lists, or to enter text.
  • The login text has been moved to the bottom left corner. To customize the text, navigate to Administer > Settings and set the “Login page footer text” on the first tab.
• Report Templates: With the new “Host – Vulnerabilities” template, you can generate reports about errata based on information from the OpenSCAP plugin. The “Jobs – Invocation report template” template helps you to export jobs, for example to JSON or CSV files.
• Increased ReservedCodeCacheSize to make Puppet run faster
• We have improved the loading times for Audits. You can navigate to Monitor > Audits to view all actions that happened on your orcharhino instance by user.
• orcharhino Server and Proxies: You don’t need to unset the http_proxy and https_proxy environment variables. This is now handled automatically by the installer
• To provision Ubuntu hosts, PXELinux preseed template now supports setting VLANs tags.

Technical preview features

• New Host Registration Process under Hosts > Register Host is now in technical preview for RHEL based distributions only
  • New “install packages” field to install packages when registering hosts with orcharhino
  • New “Repository” and “GPG Keys” field to configure additional repositories
  • New “host_init_config” template (this deprecates the old “Linux registration default” template)

Breaking Changes and Deprecations

• The Releases, Componentents, and Architectures fields for APT content are now space-separated.
• There is no option to install the “passthrough” feature on orcharhino Proxy 6.0. Instead, you can use the “streamed” option for orcharhino Proxies to relay content as requested from managed hosts from orcharhino Server to managed hosts without storing it on disk on orcharhino Proxies. Note that this also means managed hosts now have to use orcharhino Proxies as their content source. We will provide a script to automate this change with 6.1. For orcharhino 6.0, you can continue to use orcharhino Proxies 5.12.1 with “passthrough” feature enabled, in which case managed hosts are technically registered with orcharhino Server using the http_proxy global environment variable or configuring subscription-manager and their package manager accordingly.
• Managing Puppet Modules in Content > Puppet Modules has been removed.
  • Use r10k for puppet module management instead
• orcharhino API endpoints for katello-agent actions have been deprecated. Please use remote execution (REX) instead.
• Download policy background has been removed. You can use immediate to download meta data and packages during the synchronization or on-demand to only download the meta data immediately and packages at the request of content hosts.

Breaking Template Changes

• Puppet host methods in templates
  • @host.environment -> host_puppet_environment
  • @host.puppetmaster -> host_puppet_server
  • @host.puppet_ca_server -> host_puppet_ca_server

Bug Fixes

• We fixed a bug that prevented showing the correct number of errata on Content > Deb Packages in the management UI. It now shows the correct number of applicable and installable errata.
• We fixed a bug that the errata installation was using the deprecated katello-agent instead of remote execution. If you navigate to Content > Errata, select errata, and click Apply Errata, it now starts a remote execution job.
• We fixed a bug that prevented repositories obtained through the SCC Manager plugin to honor the global download policy.
• We fixed a bug that hid the Upstream Username and Upstream Password fields when editing existing repositories of type deb.