Registering clients on a public cloud

When you have your SUSE Manager Server set up, you are ready to start registering clients.

1. Add Products and Synchronize Repositories

Ensure you have already added the corresponding products for your clients and synced the repositories to SUSE Manager. This is required to create the bootstrap repositories used for registering clients.

For more information, see installation-and-upgrade:pubcloud-setup.adoc#add-product-sync-repo.

2. Prepare on-demand images

An instance started from an on-demand image provided by SUSE is automatically registered, and the update infrastructure and SUSE Linux Enterprise modules are activated. To use your on-demand image as a SUSE Manager client, you need to disable this automation before you begin.

Procedure: Preparing on-demand images

  1. Log in to the on-demand instance.

  2. At the command prompt, as root, remove the registration data and repositories:

    registercloudguest --clean

  3. Remove the trigger service for automatic registration:

    systemctl disable guestregister.service

  4. in Microsoft Azure, there is an additional service that needs to be disbaled:

    systemctl disable regionsrv-enabler-azure.timer

For instructions on registering SUSE Manager to SUSE Customer Center, see SUSE Manager Server Setup.

3. Register clients

In the SUSE Manager Web UI, navigate to Systems  Bootstrapping, then fill in the Host, SSH Port, User, and Password fields. Make sure you use stable FQDNs for the Host field, or SUSE Manager cannot find your host when your Public Cloud gives you a different short-lived FQDNS.

If you are attempting to bootstrap traditional clients, check that you can resolve the host name of the server while you are logged in to the client. You might need to add the FQDN of the server to /etc/hosts local resolution file on the client. Check using the hostname -f command with the local IP address of the server.

Public cloud images usually do not allow SSH login with username and password, but only SSH with a certificate. If you want to use bootstrap from the Web UI, you need to enable SSH login with username and SSH key. You can do this by navigating to Systems  Bootstrapping and changing the authentication method.

If your cloud provider is Microsoft Azure, you can log in with username and password. To do this, you need to allow the AzureUser to run commands as root without a password. To do this, open the /etc/sudoers.d/waagent file, and add or edit this line:

AzureUser ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

Allowing the AzureUser to run commands as root without a password carries a security risk. Use this method for testing only. Do not do this for production systems.

When the bootstrap process has completed successfully, your client is listed at Systems  System List.

  • If you want more control over the process, have to register many clients, or are registering traditional clients, create a bootstrap script. For more information, see Register Clients with a Bootstrap Script.

  • For Salt clients and even more control over the process, executing single commands on the command line can be useful. For more information, see Register on the Command Line (Salt).

  • When registering clients launched from a public cloud image (for example, AWS AMI), you need to do some additional configuration to prevent them from over-writing each other. For more information about registering clones, see Troubleshooting Registering Cloned Clients.

4. Activation keys

Activation keys are used with 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.

For more on activation keys, see Activation Keys.