How to register the system on Red Hat Satellite 5.x or Satellite Proxy server via an HTTP proxy?

Solution Verified - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux behind an http proxy
  • Red Hat Satellite 5.x / Satellite Proxy 5.x

Issue

  • How to register the system on my Red Hat Satellite 5 or Red Hat Satellite Proxy 5 server via an HTTP proxy?
  • Can a regular apache proxy be used for rhn_register, rhn_check, up2date, and yum?
  • Up2date_client errors when trying to access Satellite 5 server from behind a proxy
  • Unable to update the server due to Proxy

Resolution

README

Following the Red Hat Network (RHN) UI shutdown in July 2017, Red Hat is blocking new systems from registering to RHN beginning Oct. 31, 2017. Please refer to Red Hat Subscription Management Migration FAQ and Red Hat Subscription Management - Migrating to RHSM for more information.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4 , 5, and 6 all use the rhn_register command when registering the machine with Red Hat Satellite 5 (NOTE: RHN Classic Hosted, Satellite 5.5 and older, and stand-alone Satellite Proxy do not support RHEL 7).   For retrieving packages (or package information) from Red Hat Satellite 5 or Red Hat Satellite Proxy 5 server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4 use the up2date command, whereas RHEL 5 and 6 use the yum command. RHEL 7 systems use Red Hat Subscription Manager to register to Red Hat Customer Portal or Red Hat Satellite 6 server.

Please follow these steps to configure the machine if using rhn_register, up2date or yum to access RHN Classic, Red Hat Satellite or Red Hat Satellite Proxy via an HTTP proxy.

  1. Open /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date for editing

  2. Change the following:

    enableProxy=0
    

    To the following:

    enableProxy=1
    
  3. If proxy authentication is required, set enableProxyAuth to 1:

    enableProxyAuth=1
    
  4. Enter the user's password (if required) for the http proxy where it states the following:

    proxyPassword=
    
  5. Enter the user's username (if required) for the http proxy where it states the following:

    proxyUser=
    
  6. Enter the URL for the proxy server, in host:port format, in the following line:

    httpProxy=
    
  7. Save the file.

Also you need to setup yum for the use of you proxy server please make the following in you /etc/yum.conf

Add the following configuration into /etc/yum.conf

proxy=http://mycache.mydomain.com:3128
# The account details for yum connections
proxy_username=proxy-user
proxy_password=password.

Notes:

Diagnostic Steps

  • Test the proxy connectivity
  # telnet <proxy_hostname> <proxy_port>

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5 Comments

Hi,

the article states that ISA proxy can't be used. That is not true, only ISA Servers that require NTLM can't be used. I was able to use a ISA Proxy server that doesn't force the usage of NTLM.

Kind Regards

Benjamin

Simply passing in the user and pass variables isn't enough (at least in RHEL6). This article is missing the 'enableProxyAuth' variable in up2date. You have to set that to '1' otherwise it wont even try to use the username/password. Possibly unrelated, but this is also the case when installing Satellite 5.4 -- it will ask you for a user/password, but won't actually use it unless that variable is set in the file beforehand.

Using CNTLM as an intermediatory to a HTTP proxy will allow for authentication against NTLM based proxies too (MS ISA, Cisco Scansafe etc.

NTLMaps is another option too, but suffers from pretty poor performance in this day and age.

Good day all,

To add to John Priddy's comment here is the information for the enableProxyAuth:

enableProxyAuth[comment]=To use an authenticated proxy or not
enableProxyAuth=1

Thank you to all who had part in this post!

Hi, your article was very useful! Thnks