Issued:

2014-09-16

Updated:

2014-09-16

RHBA-2014:1206 - virt-who bug fix and enhancement update

Synopsis

virt-who bug fix and enhancement update

Type/Severity

Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

Updated virt-who packages that fix several bugs and add various enhancements are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

Description

The virt-who package provides an agent that collects information about virtual guests present in the system and reports them to the subscription manager.

The virt-who package has been upgraded to upstream version 0.9, which provides a number of bug fixes and enhancements over the previous version. Notably, the permissions for the configuration file has been changed from world-readable to root-only readable. This change is only for new installations of virt-who; existing installations should be fixed manually by setting the permission of the /etc/sysconfig/virt-who file to 600. (BZ#861552)

This update also fixes the following bugs:

• Prior to this update, the configuration file for virt-who contained incorrect permissions and was world-readable, although this file can contain passwords. As a consequence, any user could read the passwords from the configuration file. To fix this bug, the permissions have been changed to be root-readable only, and non-root users can no longer read passwords from the virt-who configuration file. (BZ#1088756)

• Previously, the virt-who utility did not report the state of virtual guests to the Subscription Asset Manager (SAM) server. To fix this bug, the info() method from libvirt has been used, and the state of a virtual machine is now reported to the SAM server. (BZ#1124732)

In addition, this update adds the following enhancements:

• With this update, support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager virtualization back end has been added to virt-who. Now, the user can use virt-who on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.11.0 to gather host/guest associations from Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager. (BZ#1009401)

• Although virt-who worked properly with VMware ESX software, the support for VMware ESXi software was not functional due to differences between ESX and ESXi. With this update, support for ESXi as virtualization back end has been provided for virt-who, which can now use both ESX and ESXi as virtualization back ends. (BZ#1078858)

Users of virt-who are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which fix these bugs and add these enhancements.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously released errata relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via the Red Hat Network. Details on how to use the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at https://access.redhat.com/site/articles/11258

Affected Products

Updated Packages

• virt-who-0.9-6.el5.noarch.rpm
• virt-who-0.9-6.el5.src.rpm

Fixes

• This content is not included.BZ - 861552
• This content is not included.BZ - 864791
• This content is not included.BZ - 975340
• This content is not included.BZ - 990957
• This content is not included.BZ - 991379
• This content is not included.BZ - 993822
• This content is not included.BZ - 1004247
• This content is not included.BZ - 1009401
• This content is not included.BZ - 1088756
• This content is not included.BZ - 1092811
• This content is not included.BZ - 1092818
• This content is not included.BZ - 1092848
• This content is not included.BZ - 1095597
• This content is not included.BZ - 1124732

CVEs

• CVE-2014-0189

References

(none)

Additional information

• The Red Hat security contact is This content is not included.secalert@redhat.com. More contact details at https://access.redhat.com/security/team/contact/.
• Offline Security Data data is available for integration with other systems. See Offline Security Data API to get started.