Small improvements can have a large impact: We are making remote reboots easier!

SUSE Manager makes patching large numbers of Linux servers so much easier. And because a picture is worth a thousand words, we’ve made a video for you.

Now, there’s one little thing that SUSE Manager leaves as an exercise to the system administrator – some updates, usually kernel patches, require a system reboot. Fortunately, compared to other operating systems this case is pretty rare on Linux. But, when you run into one of these updates and forget the reboot you may end up thinking your servers are secure, while in fact the old unpatched code is still running.

Like you, we want your Linux environment to be secure at all times.  So we’ve made it easy for SUSE Manager to identify systems that have patches applied that require a reboot, but haven’t actually been rebooted yet.

You know I like pictures, in particular videos and screenshoots. 😉 So here you go:

In the System Status view we’ve added a message that indicates that the machine needs a reboot. And of course you can schedule the reboot right away.

SUSE Manager: Reboot Button

We have also added a new Systems summary page that shows all systems that require a reboot. This makes it easy to schedule reboots for multiple machines.

SUSE Manager: Systems that need a reboot

This small, but frequently requested feature saves systems administrators a lot of time, makes it even easier for them to handle a number of servers at once, and ensures they keep systems secure with SUSE Manager.

And in case you were wondering: Yes, this feature has already made it into the upstream Spacewalk project! It’s going to be in the next major release of SUSE Manager that is based on Spacewalk 1.7, but we are also planning to release it as a maintenance update sooner.

This is Joachim Werner blogging live from SUSE in Nuremberg, where even the engineering managers are contributing code to open source projects.