SUSE Manager Server Setup

This section covers SUSE Manager Server setup, using these procedures:

  • Start SUSE Manager setup with YaST

  • Create the main administration account with the SUSE Manager Web UI

  • Name your base organization and add login credentials

  • Synchronize the SUSE Linux Enterprise product channel from SUSE Customer Center

SUSE Manager is part of the SUSE Linux Enterprise product family and thus compatible with the software shipped with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

SUSE Manager is a complex system, and therefore installing third party software is not allowed. Installing monitoring software provided by a third party vendor is allowed only if you do not exchange basic libraries such as SSL, cryptographic software, and similar tools. As part of providing product support, SUSE reserves the right to ask to remove any third party software (and associated configuration changes) and then to reproduce the problem on a clean system.

Do not register the SUSE Manager Server to itself. The SUSE Manager Server must be managed individually or by using another separate SUSE Manager Server. For more information about using multiple servers, see Using Multiple Servers to Manage Large Scale Deployments.

1. Set up SUSE Manager with YaST

This section guides you through SUSE Manager setup using YaST.

Procedure: SUSE Manager Setup

  1. On the SUSE Manager Server, at the command line, use the yast2 susemanager_setup command to begin setup.

  2. From the introduction screen select SUSE Manager Setup  Setup SUSE Manager from scratch and click Next to continue.

  3. Enter an email address to receive status notifications and click Next to continue. SUSE Manager can sometimes send a large volume of notification emails. You can disable email notifications in the Web UI after setup, if you need to. For more information on disabling email notifications, see User Details.

  4. Enter your certificate information and a password. If you intend to use a custom SSL certificate, you need to have set this up first. For more information about SSL certificates, see SSL Certificates.

  5. Click Next to continue.

  6. From the SUSE Manager Setup  Database Settings screen, enter a database user and password and click Next to continue.

  7. Click Next to continue.

  8. Click Yes to run setup when prompted, and wait for it to complete.

  9. Click Next to continue. Take a note of the address of the SUSE Manager Web UI.

  10. Click Finish to complete SUSE Manager setup.

When you create your certificate password, ensure it is at least seven characters in length. It must not contain spaces, single or double quotation marks (' or "), exclamation marks (!), or dollar signs ($). Always store your passwords in a secure location. Without this password it will not be possible to set up the SUSE Manager Proxy.

2. Creating the Main Administration Account

This section guides you through creating your organization’s main administration account for SUSE Manager.

The main administration account is the highest authority account within SUSE Manager and therefore account access information should be stored in a secure location.

For security it is recommended that the main administrator creates low level admin accounts designated for administration of organizations and individual groups.

Newer browser versions can block web access to the SUSE Manager Server FQDN in case the user enabled HSTS.

Installing the CA certificate from the pub directory via HTTP and importing it to the browser will then allow access to the server:

  1. On the server, go to http://<server>.example.com/pub/RHN-ORG-TRUSTED-SSL-CERT.

  2. Import the certificate file. In the browser settings (for Firefox), open Privacy & Security  Certificates  View Certificates, and import the file.
Procedure: Setting Up the Main Administration Account

  1. In the browser, enter the address provided after completing setup. With this address you open the SUSE Manager Web UI.

  2. In the Web UI, navigate to the Create Organization  Organization Name field and enter your organization name.

  3. In the Create Organization  Desired Login and Create Organization  Desired Password fields, enter your username and password.

  4. Fill in the Account Information fields including an email for system notifications.

  5. Click Create Organization to finish creating your administration account.

You are now presented with the SUSE Manager Home  Overview page.

3. Synchronizing Products from SUSE Customer Center

SUSE Customer Center (SCC) maintains a collection of repositories which contain packages, software and updates for all supported enterprise client systems. These repositories are organized into channels each of which provide software specific to a distribution, release, and architecture. After synchronizing with SCC clients may receive updates, and be organized into groups and assigned to specific product software channels.

This section covers synchronizing with SCC from the Web UI and adding your first client channel.

Before you can synchronize software repositories with SCC, you will need to enter organization credentials in SUSE Manager. In previous versions, so-called mirror credentials were used instead. The organization credentials give you access to the SUSE product downloads. You will find your organization credentials in https://scc.suse.com/organizations.

Enter your organization credentials in the SUSE Manager Web UI:

Procedure: Entering Organization Credentials

  1. In the SUSE Manager Web UI, select Admin  Setup Wizard.

  2. From the Setup Wizard page select the Organization Credentials tab.

  3. Click Add a new credential.

  4. In the dialog, enter Username and Password, and confirm with Save.

When the credentials are confirmed with a check-mark icon, proceed with Procedure: Synchronizing with SUSE Customer Center.

Procedure: Synchronizing with SUSE Customer Center

  1. In the Web UI, navigate to Admin  Setup Wizard.

  2. From the Setup Wizard page select the SUSE Products tab. If you previously registered with SUSE Customer Center a list of products will populate the table. This operation could take up to a few minutes. You can monitor the progress of the operation in section on the right Refresh the product catalog from SUSE Customer Center. The table of products lists architecture, channels, and status information. For more information, see Wizard.

  3. Use Filter by product description and Filter by architecture to filter the liste of displayed products. If your SUSE Linux Enterprise client is based on x86_64 architecture scroll down the page and select the check box for this channel now.

    • Add channels to SUSE Manager by selecting the check box to the left of each channel. Click the arrow symbol to the left of the description to unfold a product and list available modules.

    • Click Add Products to start product synchronization.

After adding the channel, SUSE Manager will schedule the channel to be synchronized. This can take a long time as SUSE Manager will copy channel software sources from the SUSE repositories located at SUSE Customer Center to local /var/spacewalk/ directory of your server.

In some environments, Transparent Huge Pages provided by the kernel may slow down PostgreSQL workloads significantly.

To disable Transparant Huge Pages set the transparent_hugepage kernel parameter to never. This has to be changed in /etc/default/grub and added to the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT, for example:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="resume=/dev/sda1 splash=silent quiet showopts elevator=none transparent_hugepage=never"

To write the new configuration run grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg.

Monitor the channel synchronization process in real-time by viewing channel log files located in the directory /var/log/rhn/reposync:

tail -f /var/log/rhn/reposync/<CHANNEL_NAME>.log

When the channel synchronization process is complete, you can continue with client registration. For more instructions, see Client Registration.