3.4. Installing the Operating System on the Satellite Proxy Host

Red Hat Satellite Proxy Server is designed to run on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. The first step is to install the base operating system. See the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Installation Guide [1] for details.

Note

If you have base channels for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 on your Satellite server, you can kickstart the machine to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. See the Red Hat Satellite Getting Started Guide for more information on kickstarts.
During and after the operating system installation process, ensure that you perform the following tasks:
  • Allocate sufficient space to the partition used to store packages, according to the hardware requirements prescribed earlier. The default location for cached Red Hat packages is /var/spool/squid; custom packages are located in /var/spool/rhn-proxy.

    Note

    The installation program automatically calculates the available space on the partition where /var/spool/squid is mounted and allocates up to 60 per cent of the free space for use by Satellite Proxy.
  • Ensure the firewall rules are updated to meet the requirements stated in Section 2.3, “Additional Requirements”. Modify your iptables settings and restart the service.
  • Install the packages required by Red Hat Satellite Proxy Server.

    Important

    Install only the base Satellite Proxy packages as installing additional packages might cause the Satellite Proxy installation to fail.
    See Section 2.1, “Software Requirements” for how to obtain the correct package group needed for each version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
  • Enable Network Time Protocol (NTP) and select the appropriate time zone on the Satellite Proxy and on all client systems.
After completing the installation of the base operating system, log in to the Satellite Proxy host as the root user and register the system to the Red Hat Satellite Server using the rhnreg_ks command. For example: 
[root@satproxy ~]# rhnreg_ks --serverUrl=http://satellite.example.com/XMLRPC --activationkey=1-123456789abcedf123456789abcdef12

[1] https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html-single/Installation_Guide/index.html