Registering Red Hat Enterprise Linux Clients

This section contains information about registering traditional and Salt clients running Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating systems.

Set up a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Client

Ensure that your client meets these requirements before you start:

  • 8 GB RAM or more

  • Two or more physical or virtual CPU cores

  • Access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux installation and subscription media

  • An LVM or an NFS mount is recommended

You will need to ensure you provision enough disk space. The /var/spacewalk directory contains all mirrored RPMs, and can take a significant amount of disk space. For example, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 x86_64 channels require over 90 GB.

Taskomatic will use one CPU core, and requires at least 3072 MB RAM. To ensure that Taskomatic has access to enough memory, open the /etc/rhn/rhn.conf configuration file, and add this line:

taskomatic.java.maxmemory=3072

You are responsible for arranging access to Red Hat base media repositories and RHEL installation media. You must obtain support from either Red Hat or SUSE for all your RHEL systems. If you do not do this, you might be violating your terms with Red Hat.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Channel Management

The base Red Hat Enterprise Linux software channel does not contain any packages. This is because SUSE does not provide Red Hat Enterprise Linux base media. You will need to obtain base media from Red Hat, which you can then add as a child channel to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux parent channel.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux and tools channels are provided by SUSE Customer Center. You can synchronize your client with the mgr-sync command to get them.

Because the Red Hat Enterprise Linux channels are particularly large, it can take up to 24 hours for an initial channel synchronization to complete. When you have completed the initial synchronization, we recommended you clone the channel before working with it. This provides you with a backup of the original synchronization data.

The following procedure guides you through setup of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux media as a SUSE Manager channel. All packages on the media will be mirrored into a child channel located under the distribution name and architecture.

Procedure: Setting up a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Channel

  1. In the SUSE Manager Web UI, navigate to Channels  Manage Software Channels, and click Create Channel.

  2. Fill in the channel details, and add the channel as a child to the corresponding Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution channel for your architecture. The base parent channel will not contain any packages.

  3. Modify the associated activation key to include your new child channel.

  4. At the command prompt, as root, copy your installation disk image to the /tmp directory.

  5. Create a directory to contain the media content:

    mkdir -p /srv/www/htdocs/pub/rhel

  6. Mount the ISO:

    mount -o loop /tmp/name_of_iso /srv/www/htdocs/pub/rhel

  7. Synchronize the packages with spacewalk-repo-sync:

    For Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7:

    spacewalk-repo-sync -c channel_name -u https://127.0.0.1/pub/rhel/
Repo URL: https://127.0.0.1/pub/rhel/
Packages in repo:              [...]
Packages already synced:       [...]
Packages to sync:              [...]
[...]

    For Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6:

    spacewalk-repo-sync -c channel_name -u https://127.0.0.1/pub/rhel/Server/
Repo URL: https://127.0.0.1/pub/rhel/Server/
Packages in repo:              [...]
Packages already synced:       [...]
Packages to sync:              [...]
[...]

Sometimes, the spacewalk-repo-sync will stop running during a synchronization, which will give this error:

[Errno 256] No more mirrors to try.

If this occurs, you can run spacewalk-repo-sync in debugging mode to determine the error.

Start debugging mode:

export URLGRABBER_DEBUG=DEBUG

Check the output:

/usr/bin/spacewalk-repo-sync --channel _<channel-label>_ --type yum

Disable debug mode:

unset URLGRABBER_DEBUG``

Register Red Hat Enterprise Linux Clients

Before you register Red Hat Enterprise Linux clients to your SUSE Manager Server, check that you have the corresponding Red Hat Enterprise Linux product enabled, and the required channels are fully synchronized.

You will also need an activation key associated with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux channel. For more information on activation keys, see client-configuration:clients-and-activation-keys.adoc.

Missing packages will cause your registration to fail. For Red Hat Enterprise Linux clients, packages are contained on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux installation media. Ensure you have loop-mounted the installation media, and added it as a child channel to the base Red Hat Enterprise Linux channel.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7

  • Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7

  • Mandatory channels: rhel-x86_64-server-7 , res7-suse-manager-tools-x86_64 , res7-x86_64

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

  • Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

  • Mandatory channels: rhel-x86_64-server-6 , res6-suse-manager-tools-x86_64 , res6-x86_64

There are two ways to check if a channel has finished synchronizing:

  • In the SUSE ManagerWeb UI, navigate to Admin  Setup Wizard and select the SUSE Products tab. This dialog displays a completion bar for each product when they are being synchronized.

  • You can also check the synchronization log file at the command prompt. Use the cat or tail -f command to view the /var/log/rhn/reposync/channel-label.log file. If you use this method, remember that base channels can contain multiple child channels. Each of the child channels will generate its own log during the synchronization progress. You will need to check all the base and child channel log files to be sure that the synchronization is complete.

When you are ready to register your Red Hat Enterprise Linux client, follow the instructions in client-configuration:registration-overview.adoc.