[CentOS] Sarah: RHSA tracking tool

Fri Jun 24 22:32:35 UTC 2005
Dag Wieers <dag at wieers.com>

Hi,

I'm working on a RHSA tracking tool, named Sarah. It allows you to build a 
local RHSA database of different RHEL releases and then allows you to 
verify systems for compliance (and lists applicable RHSA and required 
packages).

But before releasing my prototype, I would like to know what requirements 
people have. How they would be using such a tool and what for reports they 
need to extract.

My main reason for writing such a tool is to automate reports to send out 
to customers for getting approval for updates during planned maintenance.
My aim is to list the risk and information based on information provided 
by Red Hat.

Another use case would be to send out emails either when new RHSAs are 
released or updates are made to existing RHSAs or sending out daily or 
weekly mails for systems that are lacking certain security updates.

I bet other people have other requirements, so I like to hear about those.

PS You may wonder what it offers on top on RHN. In fact it doesn't offer 
much more than RHN already provides. But in our environment, we don't have 
RHN access for our systems (some of them are not even connected to the 
Internet) and security policy does not allow this anyway.

Plus a CLI tool that is able to access and process this information allows 
for some specialized use that RHN may not provide. Bright ideas are 
welcomed.

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]