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2.41. subscription-manager

The new Subscription Management tooling allows users to understand the specific products which have been installed on their machines, and the specific subscriptions which their machines are consuming.
  • For virtual guests, the Subscription Manager daemons use dmidecode to read the System Management BIOS (SMBIOS), which is used to retrieve the guest UUID. On 64-bit Intel architecture, the SMBIOS information is controlled by the Intel firmware and stored in a read-only binary entry. Therefore, it is not possible to retrieve the UUID or set a new and readable UUID. Because the guest UUID is unreadable, running the facts command on the guest system shows a value of Unknown in the virt.facts file for the system (virt.uuid: Unknown). This means that the guest does not have any association with the host machine and, therefore, does not inherit some subscriptions. The facts used by Subscription Manager can be edited manually to add the UUID:
    1. Obtain the guest name or guest ID.
    2. On the virtual host, use virsh to retrieve the guest UUID. For example, for a guest named 'rhel5server_virt1': 
      virsh domuuid rhel5server_virt1
    3. On the guest, manually create a facts file: 
      vim /etc/rhsm/facts/virt.facts
    4. Add a line which contains the given UUID. 
      {
  "virt.uuid": "$VIRSH_UUID"
}
    Creating the facts file and inserting the proper UUID means that Subscription Manager properly identifies the guest rather than using an Unknown value.
  • Japanese SCIM input-method editor cannot be activated and cannot input locale string in the data field for non-root users. To work around this problem, follow these steps:
    1. Log in to the system as a non-root user.
    2. As root, run the following commands: 
      ~]# export GTK_IM_MODULE=scim-bridge
~]# subscription-manager-gui
  • Using Subscription Manager in the following use case fails: a user installs Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop from a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 Client CD/DVD without an installation number. A user uses Subscription Manager, which finds one Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop product ID to subscribe to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation subscription. A user downloads content from a Workstation repository.
    The use case scenario described above fails because the rhel-workstation repositories require the rhel-5-workstation product tag in the product certification beforehand in order to view them.
    To work around this issue, follow these steps:
    1. Install a rhel-5-client system.
    2. Mount the ISO to your file system.
    3. Copy <path_to_ISO>/Workstation/repodata/productid to the /etc/pki/product/ directory, making sure that the file copied ends with .pem (for example, /etc/pki/product/productid.pem)
    4. Subscribe to a Workstation subscription.
    5. Install a package from a Workstation repository.
  • The install-num-migrate-to-rhsm tool has been removed from the subscription-manager package in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.11 due to low usage and incompatibilities with the new subscription-manager-migration-data packages. (BZ#1092754)