3.4. Customer Portal: Registration and Manual Subscription

While system registration and subscription can be performed in a single step (autoattaching), these are separate configuration areas. That means that the steps can be performed separately, which offers much more control over how systems are provisioned and how subscriptions are assigned.
With autoattaching, whatever subscriptions best match the system's architecture and currently installed products are attached automatically. This can be limiting in certain instances. For example, registering during firstboot would only attach the operating system subscriptions since no other products would yet be installed. Or, there may be a product which is not yet installed on a system, but will be soon, or a package listed for 32-bit systems which will be run on a 64-bit system.
In any of those cases, the autoattach process cannot detect the desired subscriptions because there are no settings on the system which would signal which subscriptions to include.
Dividing the registration and subscription processes allows administrators to manually select subscriptions and attach them to the systems.

3.4.1. The Environment: Small Businesses

There is nothing about registering and then applying subscriptions manually which requires that a system use Red Hat's hosted services.
There are some benefits, particularly for small businesses or infrastructures with relatively few Linux systems, to using hosted services. As with the autoattach process, using the hosted services minimizes the administrative overhead since it uses the default system configuration and requires no maintenance from IT staff.

3.4.2. Workflow

Manual Subscription Process

Figure 6. Manual Subscription Process

  1. Register the system.
    Using the subscription-manager CLI command, all this requires is sending the username and password for the Customer Portal Subscription Management account holder.
    For the Red Hat Subscription Manager UI (both run on the system and in firstboot), an autoattach operation is run by default. To undo this, check the option to skip autoattaching subscriptions. Alternatively, some subscriptions could be autoattached for the operating system, and then additional subscriptions can be attached or other subscriptions removed later.
  2. Select and attach the subscriptions, using the Red Hat Subscription Manager tools.
    When the system is registered, the subscription service sends over a list of all subscriptions that are available to the account. Any of the available subscriptions can be attached to the system.
    Using the Red Hat Subscription Manager UI, the available subscriptions are listed in the Available Subscriptions tab; they can be selected and attached by clicking a button.
    In the CLI, subscriptions are listed first using the list subcommand and then attached by their pool ID, using the attach subcommand.

3.4.3. Options and Details

Most of the options are configuration settings that can be set after registration.
  • Setting a service level preference (this can also be done during registration, so it is used as one of the priorities when selecting subscriptions).
  • Setting a release preference, so that the system only updates for software targeted to that release version and ignores any upgrades to a later operating system version.
  • Enabling or disabling associated yum repos.