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SUSE Manager Documentation › Best Practices › Managing Your Subscriptions
ContentsContents
Best Practices
  1. 1 Introduction
  2. 2 Managing Your Subscriptions
  3. 3 Expanded Support
  4. 4 Salt Formulas and SUSE Manager
  5. 5 Configuration Management with Salt
  6. 6 Salt Minion Scalability
  7. 7 Activation Key Management
  8. 8 Contact Methods
  9. 9 Advanced Patch Lifecycle Management
  10. 10 Live Patching with SUSE Manager
  11. 11 SUSE Manager Server Migration
  12. 12 Client Migration
  13. 13 PostgreSQL Database Migration
  14. 14 Backup and Restore
  15. 15 Authentication Methods
  16. 16 Using a Custom SSL Certificate
  17. 17 Troubleshooting
  18. 18 Additional Resources
  19. 19 A SUSE Manager 2.1 and 3.2 Product Comparison
  20. A GNU Licenses
  21. 20 GNU Free Documentation License
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SUSE Manager Documentation › Best Practices › Managing Your Subscriptions
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2 Managing Your Subscriptions

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

There are two methods for managing your subscriptions. Both methods access SUSE Customer Center and provide specialized benefits.

  • Directly connecting to SUSE Customer Center is the recommended default way of managing your SUSE Manager server.

  • If you have special network security requirements which do not allow access from your internal network to the internet then you can use SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 running the Repository Management Tool (RMT) or Repository Management Tool (SMT). These tools will contact SUSE Customer Center from a system connected to the external network and obtain updates for your clients which you may then mount on your internal SUSE Manager server. This is the preferred method for managing client systems within a highly secure network infrastructure.

2.1 SUSE Customer Center (SCC)

SUSE Customer Center (SCC) is the central place to manage your purchased SUSE subscriptions, helping you access your update channels and get in contact with SUSE experts. The user-friendly interface gives you a centralized view of all your SUSE subscriptions, allowing you to easily find all subscription information you need. The improved registration provides faster access to your patches and updates. SUSE Customer Center is also designed to provide a common platform for your support requests and feedback. Discover a new way of managing your SUSE account and subscriptions via one interface—​anytime, anywhere. For more information on using SUSE Customer Center , see https://scc.suse.com/docs/userguide.

2.2 Disconnected Setup with RMT or SMT (DMZ)

If it is not possible to connect SUSE Manager directly or via a proxy to the Internet, a disconnected setup in combination with RMT or SMT is the recommended solution. In this scenario, RMT or SMT stays in an “external” network with a connection to SUSE Customer Center and synchronizes the software channels and repositories on a removable storage medium. Then you separate the storage medium from RMT or SMT, and mount it locally on your SUSE Manager server to read the updated data.

RMT. The successor of SMT and currently runs on the following systems:

  • SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 (when available)

  • Temporarily (for testing only): 12 SP2, and 12 SP3

  • Not officially supported: openSUSE Leap 42.2, Leap 42.3, and openSUSE Tumbleweed

RMT allows you to provision updates for all of your devices running a product based on SUSE Linux Enterprise  12 SPx and later as well as openSUSE Leap.

SMT. The predecessor of RMT and is no longer actively developed. It runs on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server  12 SPx and allows you to provision updates for products based on SUSE Linux Enterprise  12 SPx and earlier. You will still need it, if you want to update SUSE Linux Enterprise  11 clients.

2.2.1 Repository Management Tool (RMT) and Disconnected Setup (DMZ)

The following procedure will guide you through using RMT. It will work best with a dedicated RMT instance per SUSE Manager .

Procedure: RMT: Fetching Repository Data from SUSE Customer Center

  1. Configure RMT in the external network with SCC. For details about configuring RMT, see the official guide (when available).

    1. Preparation work:

      Run rmt-cli sync to download available products and repositories data for your organization from SCC.

      Run rmt-cli products list --all to see the list of products that are available for your organization.

      Run rmt-cli repos list --all to see the list of all repositories available.

    2. With rmt-cli repos enable enable repositories you want to mirror.

    3. With rmt-cli products enableenable products. For example, to enable SLES _15:

      rmt-cli product enable sles/15/x86_64

  2. Using RMT, mirror all required repositories.

  3. Get the required JSON responses from SCC and save them as files at the specified path (for example, /mnt/usb ).

    Important
    Important: Write Permissions for RMT User

    The directory being written to must be writeable for the same user as the rmt service. The rmt user setting is defined in the cli section of /etc/rmt.conf .

    Enter:

    {prompt.root}rmt-cli export data /mnt/usb

  4. Export settings about repositories to mirror to the specified path (in this case, /mnt/usb ); this command will create a repos.json file there:

    {prompt.root}rmt-cli export settings /mnt/usb

  5. Mirror the repositories according to the settings in the repos.json file to the specified path (in this case, /mnt/usb ).

    {prompt.root}rmt-cli export repos /mnt/usb

  6. Unmount the storage medium and carry it securely to your SUSE Manager server.

On the SUSE Manager server, continue with Section 2.2.3, “Updating Repositories on SUSE Manager From Storage Media”.

2.2.2 Repository Management Tool (SMT) and Disconnected Setup (DMZ)

The following procedure will guide you through using SMT.

Procedure: SMT: Fetching Repository Data from SUSE Customer Center

  1. Configure SMT in the external network with SCC. For details about configuring SMT with SUSE Linux Enterprise 12, see https://www.suse.com/documentation/sles-12/book_smt/data/book_smt.html.

  2. Using SMT, mirror all required repositories.

  3. Create a “database replacement file” (for example, /tmp/dbrepl.xml ).

    {prompt.root}smt-sync --createdbreplacementfile /tmp/dbrepl.xml

  1. Mount a removable storage medium such as an external hard disk or USB flash drive.

  2. Export the data to the mounted medium:

    smt-sync --todir /media/disk/
smt-mirror --dbreplfile /tmp/dbrepl.xml --directory /media/disk \
           --fromlocalsmt -L /var/log/smt/smt-mirror-export.log
    Important
    Important: Write Permissions for SMT User

    The directory being written to must be writeable for the same user as the smt daemon (user=smt). The smt user setting is defined in /etc/smt.conf . You can check if the correct user is specified via the following command:

{prompt.root}egrep '^smtUser' /etc/smt.conf

+

+ .Keeping the Disconnected Server Up-to-date NOTE: smt-sync also exports your subscription data. To keep SUSE Manager up-to-date with your subscriptions, you must frequently import and export this data.

+

  1. Unmount the storage medium and carry it securely to your SUSE Manager server.

On the SUSE Manager server, continue with Section 2.2.3, “Updating Repositories on SUSE Manager From Storage Media”.

2.2.3 Updating Repositories on SUSE Manager From Storage Media

This procedure will show you how to update the repositories on the SUSE Manager server from the storage media.

Procedure: Updating the SUSE ManagerServer from the Storage Medium

  1. Mount the storage medium on your SUSE Manager server (for example, at /media/disk ).

  2. Specify the local path on the SUSE Manager server in /etc/rhn/rhn.conf:

    server.susemanager.fromdir = /media/disk

    This setting is mandatory for SUSE Customer Center and mgr-sync.

  3. Restart Tomcat:

    systemctl restart tomcat

  1. Before performing another operation on the server execute a full sync:

    mgr-sync refresh   # SCC (fromdir in rhn.conf required!)

  2. mgr-sync can now be executed normally:

    mgr-sync list channels
mgr-sync add channel channel-label
    Warning
    Warning: Data Corruption

    The disk must always be available at the same mount point. To avoid data corruption, do not trigger a sync, if the storage medium is not mounted. If you have already added a channel from a local repository path, you will not be able to change its URL to point to a different path afterwards.

Up-to-date data is now available on your SUSE Manager server and is ready for updating client systems. According to your maintenance windows or update schedule refresh the data on the storage medium with RMT or SMT.

2.2.4 Refreshing Data on the Storage Medium

Procedure: Refreshing Data on the Storage Medium from RMT or SMT

  1. On your SUSE Manager server, unmount the storage medium and carry it to your RMT or SMT.

  2. On your RMT or SMT system, continue with the synchronization step.

    Warning
    Warning: Data Corruption

    The storage medium must always be available at the same mount point. To avoid data corruption, do not trigger a sync if the storage medium is not mounted.

This concludes using RMT or SMT with SUSE Manager .

→Chapter 3 Expanded Support←Chapter 1 Introduction
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