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SUSE Manager Documentation › Best Practices

Best Practices

Publication Date: 2019-09-03

1 Introduction

1.1 What’s Covered in this Guide?
1.2 Prerequisites
1.3 Network Requirements
1.4 Hardware Recommendations

2 Managing Your Subscriptions

2.1 SUSE Customer Center (SCC)
2.2 Disconnected Setup with RMT or SMT (DMZ)

3 Expanded Support

3.1 Managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux Clients
3.2 Preparing Channels and Repositories for CentOS Traditional Clients
3.3 Registering CentOS Salt Minions with SUSE Manager
3.4 Managing Ubuntu Clients
3.5 Prepare to Register Ubuntu Clients

4 Salt Formulas and SUSE Manager

4.1 What are Salt Formulas?
4.2 Installing Salt Formulas via RPM
4.3 File Structure Overview
4.4 Editing Pillar Data in SUSE Manager
4.5 Writing Salt Formulas
4.6 Separating Data
4.7 SUSE Manager Generated Pillar Data
4.8 Formula Requirements
4.9 Using Salt Formulas with SUSE Manager
4.10 SUSE Manager for Retail Salt Formulas
4.11 Salt Formulas Coming with SUSE Manager

5 Configuration Management with Salt

5.1 Configuration Management Overview
5.2 State Data: Levels of Hierarchy
5.3 Salt States Storage Locations
5.4 SUSE Manager States
5.5 Pillar Data
5.6 Group States

6 Salt Minion Scalability

6.1 Salt Minion Onboarding Rate
6.2 Minions Running with Unaccepted Salt Keys
6.3 Salt Timeouts
6.4 Batching

7 Activation Key Management

7.1 What are Activation Keys?
7.2 Provisioning and Configuration
7.3 Activation Keys Best Practices
7.4 Combining Activation Keys
7.5 Using Activation Keys and Bootstrap with Traditional Clients (Non-Salt)
7.6 Using Activation Keys when Registering Salt Minions

8 Contact Methods

8.1 Selecting a Contact Method
8.2 Traditional Contact Method (rhnsd)
8.3 Push via SSH
8.4 Push via Salt SSH
8.5 OSAD

9 Advanced Patch Lifecycle Management

10 Live Patching with SUSE Manager

10.1 Introduction
10.2 Initial Setup Requirements
10.3 Live Patching Setup
10.4 Cloning Channels
10.5 Removing Non-live Kernel Patches from the Cloned Channels
10.6 Promoting Channels
10.7 Applying Live Patches to a Kernel

11 SUSE Manager Server Migration

11.1 Service Pack Migration Introduction
11.2 Service Pack Migration
11.3 Upgrading PostgreSQL to Version 9.6
11.4 Updating SUSE Manager
11.5 Migrating SUSE Manager version 3.1 to 3.2
11.6 SUSE Manager Migration from Version 2.1 to Version 3

12 Client Migration

12.1 Upgrading SLE 12 SPx to version 15
12.2 Migrating SLE 12 or later to version 12 SP4

13 PostgreSQL Database Migration

13.1 New SUSE Manager Installations
13.2 Migrating an Existing Installation
13.3 Performing a Fast Migration
13.4 Typical Migration Sample Session

14 Backup and Restore

14.1 Backing up SUSE Manager
14.2 Administering the Database with smdba
14.3 Database Backup with smdba
14.4 Restoring from Backup
14.5 Archive Log Settings
14.6 Retrieving an Overview of Occupied Database Space
14.7 Moving the Database
14.8 Recovering from a Crashed Root Partition
14.9 Database Connection Information

15 Authentication Methods

15.1 Authentication Via PAM
15.2 Authentication Via eDirectory and PAM
15.3 Example Quest VAS Active Directory Authentication Template

16 Using a Custom SSL Certificate

16.1 Prerequisites
16.2 Setup
16.3 Using a Custom Certificate with SUSE Manager Proxy

17 Troubleshooting

17.1 Registering Cloned Salt Minions
17.2 Registering Cloned Traditional Systems
17.3 Typical OSAD/jabberd Challenges
17.4 Gathering Information with spacewalk-report
17.5 RPC Connection Timeout Settings
17.6 Client/Server Package Inconsistency
17.7 Corrupted Repository Data
17.8 Unable to Get Local Issuer Certificate

18 Additional Resources

18.1 Learning YAML Syntax for Salt States
18.2 Getting Started with Jinja Templates
18.3 Salt Best Practices

19 A SUSE Manager 2.1 and 3.2 Product Comparison

A GNU Licenses

20 GNU Free Documentation License

List of Figures

4.1 edit-group Example in the Web UI
4.2 pxe formula
4.3 branch network formula
4.4 saltboot formula
4.5 saltboot formula partitions
4.6 Bind Formula
4.7 bind-02-zones
4.8 bind-03-records
4.9 bind-03-records2
4.10 bind-04-reverse
4.11 dhcpd formula
4.12 tftpd formula
4.13 vsftpd formula
7.1 Provisioning and Configuration Overview
7.2 Combining Activation Keys
7.3 Combining Activation Keys 2
8.1 rhnsd Contact Method
8.2 Push via SSH Contact Method
8.3 Push via Salt SSH Contact Method

List of Tables

1.1 Required Server Ports
17.1 spacewalk-report Reports
19.1 Comparing Traditional Management and Salt Management
19.2 Comparing SUSE Manager 2.1 and 3.2 Functionality

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