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Chapter 7. Subscription Management

7.1. Subscription Manager

String Updates

In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4, several strings have been renamed in Subscription Manager:
  • subscribe was renamed to attach
  • auto-subscribe was renamed to auto-attach
  • unsubscribe was renamed to remove
  • consumer was renamed to system or unit

Testing Proxy Connection

The Proxy Configuration dialog now allows users to test a connection to a proxy after entering a value.

Subscribe or Unsubscribe Multiple Entitlements

Subscription Manager is now able to subscribe (attach) or unsubscribe (remove) multiple entitlements using their serial numbers at once.

Activation Keys Support in the GUI

The Subscription Manager graphical user interface now allows you to register a system using an activation key. Activation keys allow users to preconfigure subscriptions for a system before it is registered.

Registering Against External Servers

Support for the selection of a remote server during the registration of a system is now supported in Subscription Manager. The Subscription Manager user interface provides an option to choose a URL of a server to register against, together with a port and a prefix, during the registration process. Additionally, when registering on the command line, the --serverurl option can be used to specify the server to register against. For more information about this feature, refer to the section Registering, Unregistering, and Reregistering a System in the Subscription Management Guide.

Usability Changes in the GUI

The Subscription Manager GUI has been enhanced with various changes based on customer feedback.

7.2. Subscription Asset Manager

Installation on Offline Systems

Subscription Asset Manager is now available as an ISO image and can be obtained from Content Delivery Network and Red Hat Network. It is therefore possible to install Subscription Asset Manager on offline systems.

Reduced System Registration Workload

It is now possible to configure a kickstart file with instructions to connect to Subscription Asset Manager and to automatically register and subscribe the system. This significantly reduces workloads of registering a large number of systems.

Migration

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 provides subscription-manager which includes the rhn-migrate-classic-to-rhsm script. The script has the --serverurl parameter that allows the user to point the system to an existing or on-premise installation of Subscription Asset Manager, and automatically migrates the system to use Subscription Asset Manager for its content.

Note

For more information about the 1.2 release of Subscription Asset Manager, refer to the Red Hat Subscription Asset Manager 1.2 Release Notes located at: