5 Registering Clients

For SUSE Manager 3 and later, you can choose to use either traditional or Salt client management framework, or a mixture of both, depending on your environment and requirements.

Activation keys are used with both traditional and Salt clients to ensure that your clients have the correct software entitlements, are connecting to the appropriate channels, and are subscribed to the relevant groups. Each activation key is bound to an organization, which you can set when you create the key.

This section contains information on how to create activation keys for both traditional and Salt clients, and provides some best practices for working with activation keys.

When you create activation keys, keep these best practices in mind:

In this section you will create a tools repository on the SUSE Manager Server for providing client tools. The client tools repository contains packages for installing Salt on minions as well as required packages for registering traditional clients during the bootstrapping procedure. These packages will be installed from the newly generated repository during the registration process. In the following procedure you will create the SUSE Linux Enterprise tools repository.

Important: Creating a Tools Repository when an SCC Channel has not been Synced

Before following the procedure to create the tools repository make sure the SUSE vendor channel you will be using with your client has been completely synced. You can check this by running tail -f /var/log/rhn/reposync/<CHANNEL_NAME>.log as root. In the following example replace version with the actual version string:

# tail -f /var/log/rhn/reposync/sles`version`-pool-x86_64.log

Once completed you should see the following output in your terminal:

2017/12/12 15:20:32 +02:00 Importing packages started.
2017/12/12 15:22:02 +02:00 1.07 %
...
2017/12/12 15:34:25 +02:00 86.01 %
2017/12/12 15:35:49 +02:00 Importing packages finished.
2017/12/12 15:35:49 +02:00 Linking packages to channel.
...
2017/12/12 15:35:59 +02:00 Sync completed.

This repository is suitable for both Server and Desktop of SUSE Linux Enterprise.

Note: Support for SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Products

If you have mirrored more than one SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Product (for example, SLES, {slda}, and SLES for SAP Application), you can specify the one you are actually interested in. First check what is avaiable:

mgr-create-bootstrap-repo -c SLE-15-x86_64 --with-custom-channel
Multiple options for parent channel found. Please use option
--with-parent-channel <label> and choose one of:
- sle-product-sles15-pool-x86_64
- sle-product-sles_sap15-pool-x86_64
- sle-product-sled15-pool-x86_64

Then specify it with --with-parent-channel:

mgr-create-bootstrap-repo -c SLE-15-x86_64 --with-parent-channel sle-product-sled15-pool-x86_64

There are currently three methods for registering Salt minions. This section describes the first method and uses a bootstrap repository. The second method uses the bootstrap script, and is mostly similar to the procedure described in Section 5.4, “Registering Traditional Clients”-the difference is enabling Bootstrap using Salt and the activation key option Configuration File Deployment that applies highstate automatically. The third method uses the Web UI, and is described in Book “Reference Manual”, Chapter 7 “Systems”, Section 7.6 “Bootstrapping (Salt)”.

You can also use these methods to change existing traditional clients into Salt minions.

The rest of this section assumes you have created a SUSE Manager tools repository. You can review creating a tools repository in Section 5.3, “Creating the SUSE Manager Tools Repository”.

When you have fully synchronized a base channel from the Web UI for clients to obtain software packages from (for example: SLES12-SP4-Pool_for_x86_64) perform the following procedure to register a Salt minion.

Your newly registered minion should now show up within the Web UI under Salt › Keys. Accept the pending key to begin management.