9.11. Enabling Push to Clients

In addition to allowing client systems to regularly poll the Satellite for scheduled actions, you may enable the Satellite to immediately initiate those tasks on Provisioning-entitled systems. This bypasses the typical delay between scheduling an action and the client system checking in with Red Hat Network to retrieve it. This support is provided by the OSA dispatcher (osa-dispatcher).

OSA dispatcher is a service that periodically runs a query that checks the Satellite server to see if there are any commands to be executed on the client. If there are, it sends a message through jabberd to the osad instances running on the clients.

To take advantage of this feature, you must first configure your firewall rules to allow connections on the required port(s), as described in Section 2.4, “Additional Requirements”.

Then you must install the osa-dispatcher package, which can be found in the Red Hat Network Satellite software channel for the Satellite within the central Red Hat Network website. Once installed, start the service on the Satellite as root using the command:

service osa-dispatcher start

Finally, install the osad package on all client systems to receive pushed actions. The package can be found within the Red Hat Network Tools child channel for the systems on the Red Hat Network Satellite.

Once installed, start the service on the client systems as root using the command:

service osad start

Like other services, osa-dispatcher and osad accept stop, restart, and status commands, as well.

Keep in mind, this feature depends on the client system recognizing the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the Satellite. This name and not the IP address of the server must be used when configuring the Red Hat Update Agent. Refer to the Red Hat Network Client Configuration Guide for details.

Now when you schedule actions from the Satellite on any of the push-enabled systems, the task will begin immediately rather than wait for the system to check in.