Red Hat Developer Subscription : Renewal - Best Practice

Latest response

Prelimary Note : The procedure being described below should solve registering, and subscription related problems in most of the cases !

Today was a magic day to me - I had to renew my (free no-cost) Red Hat Developer Subscription, which was somewhat painful in the last years.
This time everything worked as expected, but I think it has to do with my long time experience on how the Red Hat "subscription system" works.
I want to share the two important steps with our community members, because this topic pops up every now and then. This is how it gets done :

Once the subscription has expired - logout of the Red Hat account, then clear the web browser cache and data, close and re-open the browser.
Login to https://developers.redhat.com (do not login to https://www.redhat.com or any other Red Hat website that uses single-sign-on before).
You are getting asked to agree to the current terms and conditions. Mark all check boxes and apply, a new subscription is added to the account.

Unfortunately the new developer subscription ships with a new Pool ID, which means that all systems have to be unregistered and re-registered.
Also, all repositories that had been added or modified are set back to the default (basic) settings, additional repositories have to be re-enabled.
Here is the complete procedure to re-register the system(s), to attach the subscription, and to re-register systems to https://cloud.redhat.com :

Un-register the system :

sudo subscription-manager remove --all
sudo subscription-manager unregister
sudo subscription-manager clean

Re-register the system :

sudo subscription-manager register
sudo subscription-manager refresh

Search for the Pool ID :

sudo subscription-manager list --available

Attach the subscription :

sudo subscription-manager attach --pool=<Pool-ID>

Check for enabled repos :

sudo subscription-manager repos --list-enabled

Check for available repos :

sudo subscription-manager repos --list

Enable additional repos :

sudo subscription-manager repos --enable <repo-name>

Clean dnf and cache :
(yum for RHEL 6 / 7)

sudo dnf clean all
sudo rm -r /var/cache/dnf

Update the resources :

sudo dnf upgrade

Re-register to Insights :

sudo insights-client --register

Note : These instructions are valid for every RHEL subscription, of course - not only for the free Developer subscription - but also for paid ones.

Additional information from Red Hat : FAQs for no-cost Red Hat Enterprise Linux offered via the Red Hat Developer Subscription for Individuals

Regards,
Christian

Responses