How to register and subscribe a system offline to the Red Hat Customer Portal?

Resolution

• Offline Registration of an "air-gapped" system is entirely optional. The only requirement is that the end-user maintain the appropriate number of product subscriptions to cover their deployment, and be able to provide data to support this on request. Red Hat products are provided on a per-instance or per-installation subscription basis, which gives customers access to all subscription benefits during the subscription term. This means that while customers have an active subscription for a Red Hat product, they must maintain subscriptions for each and every instance or installation of Red Hat software being used in their environment.

• To register an "offline" or "air-gapped" system, you need to manually create a system profile using Red Hat Subscription Management (RHSM) in the Customer Portal. This profile serves as a placeholder and will not be connected to your actual system.

  1. Create a system profile: From the Systems page in RHSM, click the New button. Provide the required information to finish creating the new system profile.

  2. Attach subscriptions: In your newly created system profile, click the Subscriptions tab, and attach any subscriptions you want to use with the system.

  3. Download and import the entitlement certificate(s): From the "Subscriptions" tab on your system profile, click Download Certificates to download the entitlement certificate(s) for attached subscriptions. The downloaded archive will be in zip format and will be named similar to 'aaaa1111-bb22-cc33-dd44-eeeeee555555_certificates.zip'.

  # unzip -l d01bcb4f-8d59-433f-xxxx-0612dd2266db_certificates.zip 
  Archive:  d01bcb4f-8d59-433f-xxxx-0612dd2266db_certificates.zip
  signed Candlepin export for d01bcb4f-8d59-433f-xxxx-0612dd2266db
  Length      Date    Time    Name
  ---------  ---------- -----   ----
    18091  05-07-2018 14:35   consumer_export.zip
      512  05-07-2018 14:35   signature
  ---------                     -------
    18603                     2 files
  

  # unzip  d01bcb4f-8d59-433f-xxxx-0612dd2266db_certificates.zip
  

• This archive will contain another archive named 'consumer_export.zip'. Extract the content and in the ./export/entitlement_certificates/ folder you will find your certificate(s) in PEM format.

  # unzip -l consumer_export.zip 
  Archive:  consumer_export.zip
  Candlepin export for d01bcb4f-8d59-433f-xxxx-0612dd2266db
  Length      Date    Time    Name
  ---------  ---------- -----   ----
    23619  05-07-2018 14:35   export/entitlement_certificates/xxxx.pem
      137  05-07-2018 14:35   export/meta.json
  ---------                     -------
    23756                     2 files
  

  # unzip  consumer_export.zip
  

• Move these to the client system's /tmp directory.

  
   # subscription-manager import --certificate=/tmp/Name_Of_Downloaded_Entitlement_Cert.pem
  
   e.g. : # subscription-manager import --certificate=/tmp/xxxx.pem
  
  

• This completes the registration of the offline system.

• You can verify that entitlement certificates were successfully imported by reviewing: # subscription-manager list --consumed

Note:

When you register an online system via # subscription-manager register, it automatically creates a connected profile on the Customer Portal, whereas in offline registration, you are manually creating a disconnected profile on the Portal.

After following this procedure, your system profile in the Customer Portal will show a subscription status "Unknown" and the command # subscription-manager status will output "Unknown." This is the expected behavior. For more information, please refer Subscription status "Unknown" on system registered offline

If you want to update your air-gapped system, you can create a Local Repository and update your offline system by Referring to: Creating a Local Repository and Sharing With Disconnected/Offline/Air-gapped Systems [Primary Article]