Automating Data Centers: Highlights of the orcharhino Release 6.5

Today, ATIX is presenting orcharhino Version 6.5. The release contains numerous new functions and stability improvements. For example, there are now new orcharhino clients for Debian 12 "Bookworm", SLES15 SP5, and Oracle Linux 8.8. In addition, ATIX is introducing the concept of orcharhino Client Generations, which allows for graceful upgrades from now on. “Breaking changes” to the orcharhino Client will only be introduced in the context of a new orcharhino Client Generation. Therefore, existing orcharhino servers will need to change the upstream URL or add a new orcharhino client repository to use the new generation. 

After a new orcharhino client generation is released, the old generation remains available, but no longer receives updates except for bug fixes and security patches. New installations of orcharhino 6.5 will automatically receive orcharhino clients "gen2." 

There was also an important change in the documentation: we now make it available on docs.orcharhino.com for multiple orcharhino versions in parallel. You can select your orcharhino version in the top right-hand corner. On the home page, you will always find the documentation for the current orcharhino version.  

Over the course of upcoming releases, orcharhino will transition to a new way of displaying APT content for registered Debian and Ubuntu systems that better reflects the structure of the APT repository synchronized with orcharhino. This will improve compatibility with client-side features such as APT pinning or the "apt list –upgradable" command. It will also significantly reduce synchronization time once the transition is complete. orcharhino 6.5 includes these new features as a tech preview.