this is obsolete doc -- see http://doc.nethence.com/ instead

Installing Spacewalk version 1.9 on CentOS 5 using an Oracle database 

Requirements 

Disable SElinux (I am not sure this is mandatory but I am proceeding like this anyway) and firewalling. 

Make sure your fully quafied domain name resolves to your IP (check /etc/hosts). Also make sure that hostname is registered into your DNS system so you could access it simply from some workstation on the network. 

Make sure the system is able to send email, you will have to provide an email for the SSL certificate used by the web server and Spacewalk itself should be able to send some message to its users. 

Ask for your database administrator to prepare a database for you with e.g. 500MB of SGA (for a small testing infrastructure) or do it yourself (see the other guide for that, 11gR2 on RHEL5). A schema with several privileges is needed so I just granted the whole thing, "dba" to it. No "#" or "@" signs in the password is a requirement for Spacewalk 1.9. 

Install those additional repositories, 

wget http://yum.spacewalkproject.org/1.9/RHEL/5/x86_64/spacewalk-repo-1.9-1.el5.noarch.rpm

wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

wget http://yum.spacewalkproject.org/1.9-client/RHEL/5/x86_64/spacewalk-client-repo-1.9-1.el5.noarch.rpm

rpm -Uvh spacewalk-repo-1.9-1.el5.noarch.rpm

rpm -Uvh epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

rpm -Uvh spacewalk-client-repo-1.9-1.el5.noarch.rpm

Note. Installing the spacewalk-repo repository to replace the mandatory rhn-client-tools and rhnlib on RHEL5. 

Note. The EPEL release 5.4 is the latest as of today for RHEL5/CentOS5 even 5.9, eventually change it accordingly (http://mirrors.ircam.fr/pub/fedora/epel/5/i386/repoview/epel-release.html). 

Installing the Oracle Instant Client 

Get the exact needed version 11.2.0.3.0 (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/linuxx86-64soft-092277.html) for BASIC and SQLPLUS -- as RPM so the dependencies match -- and install those (required for the next step), 

rpm -ivh \

oracle-instantclient11.2-basic-11.2.0.3.0-1.x86_64.rpm \

oracle-instantclient11.2-sqlplus-11.2.0.3.0-1.x86_64.rpm

Now check that you can access your database with sqlplus, 

sqlplus spaceuser/PASSWORD@spacedb

Note. Change the schema name, password and database name accordingly. 

Note. No "#" or "@" signs in the password is a requirement for Spacewalk 1.9. 

Installing and configuring Spacewalk 

You can now finally proceed and install Spacewalk for Oracle, 

yum install spacewalk-oracle

Now provide the database informations, that setup script will populate the tables and shit, 

spacewalk-setup --disconnected --external-db

it will also as for an administrator email address and informations to create an SSL certificate. 

Ready to go 

You should now be able to connect to Spacewalk with a web browser on your network, 

https://spacewalk_server/

Create a first level administrative account e.g. "admin". 

The default repository is into /var/satellite. 

References 

Spacewalk Installation Instructions (https://fedorahosted.org/spacewalk/wiki/HowToInstall)