A.3. Red Hat Network Configuration Manager

Unlike the Red Hat Network Configuration Client, the Red Hat Network Configuration Manager (rhncfg-manager) is designed to maintain RHN's central repository of config files and channels, not those located on client systems. This tool offers a command line alternative to the configuration management features within the RHN website, as well as the ability to script some or all of the related maintenance.
It is intended for use by Config Administrators and requires an RHN username and password that has the appropriate permission set. The username may be specified in /etc/sysconfig/rhn/rhncfg-manager.conf or in the [rhncfg-manager] section of ~/.rhncfgrc.
When the Red Hat Network Configuration Manager is run as root, it attempts to pull in needed configuration values from the Red Hat Update Agent. When run as a user other than root, you may have to make configuration changes within the ~/.rhncfgrc file. The session file is cached in ~/.rhncfg-manager-session to prevent logging in for every command.
The default timeout for the Red Hat Network Configuration Manager is 30 minutes. To alter this, add the server.session_lifetime option and new value to the /etc/rhn/rhn.conf file on the server running the manager, like so:
 server.session_lifetime = 120 
The Red Hat Network Configuration Manager offers these primary modes: add, create-channel, diff, diff-revisions, download-channel, get, list, list-channels, remove, remove-channel, revisions, update, and upload-channel.
Each mode offers its own set of options, which can be seen by issuing the following command:
 rhncfg-manager mode --help 
Replace mode with the name of the mode to be inspected:
rhncfg-manager diff-revisions --help
You can see such a list of options for the add mode at Table A.4, “rhncfg-manager add options”.

A.3.1. Creating a Config Channel

To create a config channel for your organization, issue the command:
 rhncfg-manager create-channel channel-label
If prompted for your RHN username and password, provide them. The output resembles the following:
 Red Hat Network username: rhn-user 
 Password:
 Creating config channel channel-label 
 Config channel channel-label created
Once you have created a config channel, use the remaining modes listed above to populate and maintain that channel.