Setup of the PostgreSQL database
You should have PostgreSQL server running somewhere. Let's assume you will run the server on the same machine as Spacewalk itself:
yum install -y 'postgresql-server > 8.4' # we do this to get postgresql84-server on RHEL 5 chkconfig postgresql on # on Fedora 16 run: postgresql-setup initdb # everywhere else run: service postgresql initdb service postgresql start
Create database, user, and plpgsql language there:
su - postgres -c 'PGPASSWORD=spacepw; createdb spaceschema ; createlang plpgsql spaceschema ; yes $PGPASSWORD | createuser -P -sDR spaceuser'
Configure the user to use md5 password to connect to that database. Put the lines like following to/var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf. Avoid the common pitfall: Make sure you put them *before* those existing lines that are for all..
local spaceschema spaceuser md5 host spaceschema spaceuser 127.0.0.1/8 md5 host spaceschema spaceuser ::1/128 md5 local spaceschema postgres ident
Then reload PostgreSQL:
service postgresql reload
and test the connection:
PGPASSWORD=spacepw psql -a -U spaceuser spaceschema PGPASSWORD=spacepw psql -h localhost -a -U spaceuser spaceschema
Please note that you will want the TCP connection allowed as well because the JDBC driver cannot use the Unix domain socket. So even if the Python and Perl stack will use the Unix domain socket if you do not specify the hostname, JDBC will still go to localhost via TCP.
If you want to have the database on a separate box you will likely need to change this line in pg_hba.conf from 127.0.0.1/8 to something else:
host spaceschema spaceuser 127.0.0.1/8 md5
and also to add line to /var/lib/pgsql/data/postgresql.conf
listen_addresses = '*'
The contrib package
If your PostgreSQL server is installed on different machine than where you setup your Spacewalk server, please make sure the postgresql-contrib >= 8.4 (or postgresql84-contrib on RHEL 5) is installed on the PostgreSQL server.
Note If Using Postgresql 9.0 or Higher
Depending on what version of the JDBC drivers you have available you may hit this issue: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4868762/hibernate-3-3-2ga-improperly-loads-bytea-data-from-postgresql-9-0-and-all-type-m
This would have the effect of displaying a hex number instead of the contents of a config file that you have uploaded. If you hit this issue the easiest workaround is to add this line to postgresql.conf:
bytea_output = 'escape'
Tune up PostgreSQL
Tune up PostgreSQL's performance by running pgtune:
yum install pgtune pgtune --type=web -c 600 -i /var/lib/pgsql/data/postgresql.conf >/tmp/pgtune.conf # Review the changes by diff -u /var/lib/pgsql/data/postgresql.conf /tmp/pgtune.conf cp /var/lib/pgsql/data/postgresql.conf /var/lib/pgsql/data/postgresql.conf.bak cp /tmp/pgtune.conf /var/lib/pgsql/data/postgresql.conf service postgresql restart
or at least increase maximal number of connections to 600:
echo max_connections = 600 >>/var/lib/pgsql/data/postgresql.conf