Migrating Spacewalk to an external Postgresql-DB

It's quite easy to migrate spacewalk to run off a external db-instance.
Here I will show how to migrate the embedded db to an external server.

The requirements:

• spacewalk-utils and spacewalk-dobby must be installed on the spacewalk-server
• an external postgresql-server allowing connections from the spacewalk using your user and db
• Same version of the database on both servers (9.2)

Let's get started

First we need to stop all Spacewalk-services. Do that by running the following command:

 [archy@spacewalk ~]$ sudo spacewalk-service stop  

and start the db-service from spacewalk

 [archy@spacewalk ~]$ sudo db-control start  

Next we will make a backup of our currently running database. My recommendation is also to back it up and store it on a nother server regularly.

 [archy@spacewalk ~]$ sudo spacewalk-dump-schema --to=postgresql > spacewalk_migration_backup.sql  

Now we can stop the internal database

 [archy@spacewalk ~]$ sudo db-control stop  

Now we will have to switch over to the pgsql-server and modify the database a bit.
Run the following on the db-server.

 [archy@pgsql01 ~]$ sudo su - postgres  
 [postgres@pgsql01 ~]$ psql  
 CREATE USER rhnuser WITH PASSWORD 'my_secret_password';  
 ALTER USER rhnuser WITH SUPERUSER;  
 CREATE DATABASE rhnschema;  
 GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE rhnschema to rhnuser;  
 \q  
 psql -d rhnschema  
 CREATE LANGUAGE 'pltcl';  
 CREATE LANGUAGE 'pltclu';  
 \q  

The database is setup now.
Switch over to the Spacewalk-server and run the setup again to setup the db and give it the external db.

 [archy@spacewalk ~]$ sudo spacewalk-setup --dbonly --external-postgresql  

The installer will ask you what hostname (IP-Address), user and database it should use.
If the installer is finished. import the sql-dump into the spacewalk-database. Run

 [archy@spacewalk ~]$ sudo spacewalk-sql -i < spacewalk_migration_backup.sql  

on the Spacewalk-server.

You can now start the spacewalk-services again by issuing

 [archy@spacewalk ~]$ sudo spacewalk-service start  

This completes it.

Feel free to comment and / or suggest a topic.