[rhn-users] Determining whether RHEL4 is registered?

[Phil Edwards]

Timothy Kallinis wrote:
> Hi, I have an interesting dilemma regarding registration with up2date in 
> RHEL4. I have a yum (yum-arch) repo I want to use under RHEL4 with 
> up2date. However, if a system is not registered, I need to comment out 
> the following line:
> 
> up2date default
> 
> in /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources
> 

Hi Timothy:

I had a slightly similar issue to deal with. As I work for an 
organisation which deploys an average of 3 - 5 new servers a week, my 
solution may not be wholly appropriate for you, but see what you think:

I copied the contents of the RHEL4 U4 install media onto a server which 
could be accessed within our RFC1918 address space using FTP. I 
converted this into a yum repository by running the normal yum-arch and 
createrepo commands against the directory tree.

I built and installed yum and its associated dependencies from their 
various source tarballs. Once I had this process nailed, I generated a 
bunch of RPMs to allow any RHEL4 machine to have yum installed 
independently of up2date.

Finally, I generated a 'noarch' RPM which contains nothing else apart 
from a /etc/yum.repos.d config file which points at the repo I created 
on our FTP server.

My base RHEL4 install is extremely minimal and includes only what is 
absolutely necessary to get a new server up and running as quickly as 
possible. This is used as a base template for live server deployments. 
It also has my yum RPMs installed.

Our server deployment process becomes quite simple at this point. We 
copy the 'template' install onto the destination hardware and power it 
up. At first boot, a provisioning script runs which grabs an XML config 
from a central server and then runs a series of yum commands in order to 
install any additional software which may be required. This would 
typically be Apache/MySQL for a web server, Postfix or sendmail if the 
box is to be used as a mail server, etc, etc.

Since the yum install doesn't care about the servers RHN registration 
status, the server can stay on our private IP address space while it is 
being built, and while any additional software is installed. Once it is 
put onto a real internet IP, it can be registered with RHN and have the 
latest updates applied automatically.

-- 

Regards

Phil Edwards
Brighton, UK