9 Configuring Clients to Use SMT #

As root, start YaST and select Miscellaneous › Autoinstallation to start the graphical AutoYaST front-end.

From a command line, you can start the graphical AutoYaST front-end with the yast2 autoyast command.

Open an existing profile using File › Open, create a profile based on the current system's configuration using Tools › Create Reference Profile, or work with an empty profile.

Select Software › Novell Customer Center Configuration. An overview of the current configuration is shown.

Click Configure.

Set the URL of the SMT Server and, optionally, the location of the SMT Certificate. The possible values are the same as for the kernel parameters regurl and regcert (see Section 9.1, “Using Kernel Parameters to Access an SMT Server”). The only exception is that the ask value for regcert does not work in AutoYaST, because it requires user interaction. If using it, the registration process will be skipped.

Perform all other configuration needed for the systems to be deployed.

Select File › Save As and enter a file name for the profile, such as autoinst.xml.

As root, start YaST and select Miscellaneous › Autoinstallation to start the graphical AutoYaST front-end.

From a command line, you can start the graphical AutoYaST front-end with the yast2 autoyast command.

Open an existing profile using File › Open, create a profile based on the current system's configuration using Tools › Create Reference Profile, or work with an empty profile.

Select Software › Product Registration. An overview of the current configuration is shown.

Click Edit.

Check Register the Product, set the URL of the SMT server in Use Specific Server URL Instead of the Default, and you can set the Optional SSL Server Certificate URL. The possible values for the server URL are the same as for the kernel parameter regurl. For the SSL certificate location, you can use either HTTP or HTTPS based URLs.

Perform all other configuration needed for the systems to be deployed, then click Finish to return to the main screen.

Select File › Save As and enter a file name for the profile, such as autoinst.xml.

Install SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) with the SMT packages as per the documentation on the respective products.

During SMT setup, use organization credentials that have access to Novell-provided RHEL update repositories.

Verify that the organization credentials have access to download updates for the Red Hat products with

smt-repos -m | grep RES

Enable mirroring of the RHEL update repositories for the desired architecture(s):

smt-repos -e REPO-NAME ARCHITECTURE

Mirror the updates and log verbose output:

smt-mirror -d -L /var/log/smt/smt-mirror.log

The updates for RHEL will also be mirrored automatically as part of the default nightly SMT mirroring cron job. When the mirror process of the repositories for your RHEL products has completed, the updates are available via

http://smt-server.your-domain.top/repo/$RCE/REPOSITORY_NAME/ARCHITECTURE/

To enable GPG checking of the repositories, the key used to sign the repositories needs to be made available to the RHEL clients. This key is now available in the res-signingkeys package, which is included in the SMT 11 installation source.

Import the repository signing key downloaded above into the local RPM database with

rpm --import http://smt.example.com/repo/keys/res-signingkeys.key

Create a file in /etc/yum.repos.d/ and name it RES5.repo.

Edit the file and enter the repository data, and point to the repository on the SMT server as follows:

[smt]
name=SMT repository
baseurl=http://smt.example.com/repo/$RCE/REPOSITORY_NAME/ARCHITECTURE/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1

Example of base URL:

http://smt.mycompany.com/repo/$RCE/RES5/i386/

Save the file.

Disable standard Red Hat repositories by setting

enabled=0

in the repository entries in other files in /etc/yum.repos.d/ (if any are enabled).

Both YUM and the update notification applet should work correctly now and notify of available updates when applicable. You may need to restart the applet.

Import the repository signing key downloaded above into the local RPM database with

rpm --import http://smt.example.com/repo/keys/res-signingkeys.key

Edit the file /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources and make the following changes:

Comment out any lines starting with up2date.

Normally, there will be a line that says "up2date default".

Add an entry pointing to the SMT repository (all in one line):

yum REPO_NAME http://smt.example.com/repo/$RCE/REPOSITORY_NAME/ARCHITECTURE/

where repo-name should be set to RES3 for 3.9 and RES4 for 4.7.

Save the file.

Install the suseRegisterRES package.

yum install suseRegisterRES

Note: Additional Packages

You may need to install the perl-Crypt-SSLeay and perl-XML-Parser packages from the original RHEL media.

Copy the SMT certificate to the system:

wget http://smt.example.com/smt.crt

cat smt.crt >> /etc/pki/tls/cert.pem

Edit /etc/suseRegister.conf to point to SMT by changing the URL value to

url: https://smt.example.com/center/regsvc/

Register the system:

suse_register

Install the suseRegisterRES package:

up2date --get suseRegisterRES
up2date --get perl-XML-Writer
rpm -ivh /var/spool/up2date/suseRegisterRES*.rpm /var/spool/up2date/perl-XML-Writer-0*.rpm

Note: Additional Packages

You may need to install the perl-Crypt-SSLeay and perl-XML-Parser packages from the original RHEL media.

Copy the SMT certificate to the system:

wget http://smt.example.com/smt.crt

cat smt.crt >> /usr/share/ssl/cert.pem

Edit /etc/suseRegister.conf to point to SMT by changing the URL value to

url = https://smt.example.com/center/regsvc/

or (for SUSE Customer Center)

url = https://smt.example.com

Register the system:

suse_register