What are Entitlement Certificates in Red Hat Subscription Management?

Solution Verified - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux

  • Red Hat Subscription Management (RHSM)

Issue

  • What are Entitlement Certificates?

  • What information does the Entitlement Certificate contain?

Resolution

Subscriptions and systems are managed globally through the Red Hat entitlement service which is integrated with the Customer Portal.
For Simple Content Access disabled accounts, whenever a subscription is attached to a system, the system is entitled to support services and content for that product and the entitlement certificates attached to a system are in a certificate file which is located at /etc/pki/entitlement/ directory.

For SCA enabled accounts, once after registration, the entitlement certificates are generated under /etc/pki/entitlement directory.

SCA disabled entitlement certificates contain additional information about available products, order details and configured content repositories while SCA enabled entitlement certificates do not contain available products and order details.

If your account is SCA disabled, the system is allocated a product subscription by subscribing to the entitlement pool that makes that product available and unsubscribing a machine removes it from the product or entitlement pool, which releases that entitlement subscription it had consumed.

If your account is SCA enabled, the system has access to content after registration, regardless of subscription status.

Both Subscription Manager and product information is contained in X.509 certificates.

To obtain this information you can use:

# openssl x509 -text -in /etc/pki/entitlement/##################.pem

The following command can be run to see what product/products you have currently installed on the system.

# subscription-manager list

The below command will show the subscriptions being consumed by the system.

# subscription-manager list --consumed

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