Re: Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network

[Jamie Wilkinson]

This one time, at band camp, wbmccarty@gmail.com wrote:
>Jamie, the rhnreg_ks script facilitates first-time RHN registration of
>a system in batch mode, right? That is, it doesn't seem to have
>provision for specifying the key/certificate information pertaining to
>an already registered host. If that's right, a user would have to have
>a sufficient number of unallocated RHN entitlements to cover each
>system on which rhnreg_ks is run.

Yeah, that's right.  In the olden days you could have more machines
subscribed than entitled, and you could manually change those entitlements
to update the network, but they've since stopped that.

>In my case, I don't have more than a handful of unallocated
>entitlements. So, I want to re-use or write over the entitlement
>associated with an OS build being overwritten in a bare-metal recovery
>or re-deployment.

It sounds like you don't have enough entitlements to cover your network,
but you can delete entitlements and --force the registration to create a new
one when one already exists on the machine.

But thems the breaks; RHN is a revenue stream for Red Hat, so they don't
encourage this sort of thing.  Your options are to either buy enough
entitlements or to whip up some caching mechanism (i.e. using yum-arch to
build up a local updates repository) to get your machines updated.  Of
course this is likely to reduce your Red Hat support even further.