6 Managing Client Machines with SMT #
SMT lets you register and manage client machines on SUSE Customer Center. Client machines must be configured to use SMT. For information about configuring clients to use SMT, see Chapter 9, Configuring Clients to Use SMT.
6.1 Listing Registered Clients #
To list SMT-registered client machines, use the
smt-list-registrations
command. The following information
is listed for each client: its ,
, date and time of with the SMT server, and the Software
the client uses.
6.2 Deleting Registrations #
To delete a registration from SMT and SUSE Customer Center, use the following command:
smt-delete-registration -g Client_ID
To delete multiple registrations, the option -g
can be used
several times.
The ID of the client machine to be deleted can be determined from the output
of the smt-list-registrations
command.
6.3 Manual Registration of Clients at SUSE Customer Center #
The smt-register
command registers clients at SUSE Customer Center. This
registers all unregistered clients and clients with data that changed
since the last registration.
To register clients whose registration has failed, use the
--reseterror
option. This option resets the SCC
registration error flag and tries to submit registrations again.
6.4 Scheduling Periodic Registrations of Clients at SUSE Customer Center #
SMT module allows for the easy scheduling of client registrations. By default, registrations are scheduled to run every 15 minutes. To create or modify a new registration schedule, follow the steps below.
Start YaST
module (yast2 smt-server
).Go to the
.Select any
job and click to change its schedule.To create a new registration schedule, click
and select as .Choose the
of the scheduled SMT job. You can perform jobs , , , or (every n-th hour or every m-th minute).Set the
by entering the and or appropriate time periods. For weekly and monthly schedules, select the or the the mirroring should occur.Note: Lowest Registration FrequencyDo not set the frequency lower than 10 minutes, because the maximum value of the
rndRegister
is 450 (7.5 minutes). If the frequency is lower, it may happen that the started process is still sleeping when the next process starts. This causes the second request to exit.Click
or and .
Scheduling of SMT jobs in general is covered in Section 3.5, “Setting the SMT Job Schedule with YaST”.
YaST uses cron
to schedule SUSE Customer Center registrations and
other SMT jobs. If you prefer not to use YaST, you can use
cron
directly.
To disable automatic registration, change the
forwardRegistration
value in the [LOCAL]
section of the /etc/smt.conf
configuration file to
false
.
6.5 Compliance Monitoring #
To assist customers in monitoring their license compliance, SMT generates a weekly report based on data from SMT and SUSE Customer Center. This report contains information about statistics of the registered machines, products used, and of the active, expiring or missing license subscriptions. If subscriptions are about to expire and/or more SUSE Linux Enterprise machines are registered than you have purchased licenses for, the report contains relevant warnings.
To calculate the compliance, the smt-report
tool
by default downloads information about the subscriptions and registrations
(this can be disabled).
You can configure the recipient addresses for the reports in the
[REPORT]
section of /etc/smt.conf
and explained in Section 8.2.1.6, “[REPORT] Section of /etc/smt.conf”.
The scheduling of the reports is configured in
/etc/cron.d/novell.com-smt
, while the parameters to use
with the cron jobs are in the REPORT_PARAMS
section of
/etc/smt.d/smt-cron.conf
.
Describing the content of the reports is beyond the scope of this section,
but a set of reports can be split into five individual parts. By default,
these reports are attached as individual files to the mail on the weekly
report run. The alerts report is a normal text file while the others are in
CSV format. The reports can also be created in PDF or XML by specifying
--pdf
or --xml
as output format.
To generate a set of reports as CSV files based on local data and to display them in the standard output, run the following command:
smt-report --local --csv --file /root/smt-local-rep
The example stores the reports in the /root
directory.
You can change it to any other writable directory.
The command generates the following files:
/root/smt-local-rep-product_subscription_active.csv /root/smt-local-rep-product_subscription_alerts.txt /root/smt-local-rep-product_subscription_expired.csv /root/smt-local-rep-product_subscription_expiresoon.csv /root/smt-local-rep-product_subscription_summary.csv
If you have multiple SMT servers, the reports may not include all SMT servers or machines in your environment. For the complete statistics of all your registered machines, refer to the information provided by SUSE Customer Center.
For more information about types of reports, output formats, and targets refer to Chapter 7, SMT Reports.