4. Managing Systems

4.1. Registering a New System

Before a system can have any subscriptions attached to it, it has to be added into the inventory in the Customer Portal Subscription Management. This process is called registering. While registering is frequently a local operation as part of setting up or administering a machine, registering and unregistering through Customer Portal Subscription Management can be very useful when you are managing the entire infrastructure and need a more global perspective or when you need to manage systems that are not connected to an external network.
Some systems may not have internet connectivity, but administrators still want to attach and track the subscriptions for that system. This can be done by manually registering the system, rather than depending on Subscription Manager to perform the registration. This has two major steps, first to create an entry on the subscriptions service and then to configure the system.
  1. Expand the Subscriptions tab, open the Subscription Management item, and select the Units item.
  2. Click the Register link at the top of the table.
  3. Fill in the information for the new system.
    A system requires information about the architecture and hardware in order to ascertain what subscriptions are available to that system.
    • The name for the entry, which is normally the hostname.
    • The system type, physical or virtual.
    • The architecture, which is used to determine compatible subscriptions.
    • The number of sockets, either the number of physical sockets or, for virtual machines, the number of CPUs. Some subscriptions cover to a certain number of sockets, and multiple subscriptions may be required to cover larger systems.
  4. Once the system is created, attach the appropriate subscriptions to that system.
    1. Open the Attached Subscriptions tab.
    2. Click the Attach a subscription link.
    3. Click the check boxes by all of the subscriptions to attach, and then click the Attach Selected button.
  5. Click the Download link to download the entitlement certificate for each subscription. Save the file to some kind of portable media, like a flash drive.
  6. Optionally, open the Identity Certificate tab and click the Download button. The identity certificate for the registered system could be used by the system to connect to the subscription management service. If the system will permanently be offline, then this is not necessary, but if the system could ever be brought onto the network, then this is useful.
  7. Copy the entitlement certificates from the media device over to the system.
  8. Import the entitlement certificates. This can be done by using the Import Certificates item in the System menu in the Subscription Manager UI or by using the import command. For example: 
    [root@server ~]# subscription-manager import /
     --certificate=/tmp/export/entitlement_certificates/596576341785244687.pem /
     --certificate=/tmp/export/entitlement_certificates/3195996649750311162.pem
Successfully imported certificate 596576341785244687.pem
Successfully imported certificate 3195996649750311162.pem
  9. If you downloaded an identity certificate, copy the cert.pem file directly into the /etc/pki/consumer directory. For example: 
    [root@server ~]# cp /tmp/downloads/cert.pem /etc/pki/consumer