Overview

Our RHSMD has been built using Flask AppBuilder (the same technology as our Airflow and Superset stack) which provides (i) a CRUD-based RDBMS infrastructure; (ii) it’s own API/endpoint management; (iii) the RHSM/REST endpoints required for subscription-manager.

The web features allow us to easily manage and operate our subscriptions and provide you an ability to create an account to claim and manage your cloud-based BastionLinux systems.

Products

Each AMI we ship into a Cloud/Marketplace is a product. This is a very tangible thing. It has an X509 certificate which contains extended features about accessing our repositories for ongoing release management.

subscription-manager list

We deploy each product definition certificate via it’s own RPM package.

Entitlements

When you spin up one of our Cloud/Marketplace instances; it automatically registers with our entitlements services. This registration includes two components; (i) an identity certificate with embedded system/host id; and (ii) entitlement certificate(s) which maintain your access to the above product(s).

subscription-manager status

You are in good standing if your status is anything other than Unknown.

Subscription Manager is embedded within DNF and maintains itself in the /etc/yum.repos.d/redhat.repo file. This is not editable by hand (it gets overwritten all the time) and it uses these entitlement certificates to handshake with our repo servers to use DNF for software management.

subscription-manager repos

The equivalent within DNF:

dnf repolist

There are a bunch of things you can do within subscription-manager - do explore …

It mostly all happens automagically - whenever DNF runs; or the subscription manager daemon runs; so you don’t really need to do anything.

Subscriptions

Entitlements and subscriptions are subtly different. Out of the box we give you an entitlement. A subscription is more focused around enterprise licensing. Within that; we can offer pools of entitlements and environments - and more.

This requires us to set up features on your tenancy in our RHSM. Thus it’s no longer the peripheral touch you’ve accessed so far. Do talk to us; and then you’ll be able to use attach and redeem features within subscription-manager.

Configuration

All of the configuration happens within /etc/rhsm/rhsm.conf - and since you have root access; you can edit/change this as much as you want.

If you do wish to continue accessing our repos for ongoing support of your BastionLinux product; it is probably best not to change this.

Third Party Repos

Our RHSMD does not exclude you from adding any other third party repo. So long as you leave ‘redhat.repo’ alone; you can collate any other set of repository definitions and operate your DNF as you wish.

BastionLinux is baselined against Fedora - so it is likely you would have some success with their repositories.

But we are not a direct clone; so you could easily find yourself in dependency management hell; and either (i) not update to the version in the third-party; or remove the BastionLinux/product in doing so.

Your mileage will definitely vary.

Removing RHSMD

It is completely your prerogative to remove subscription-manager entirely. All that will happen is that you will not longer receive future software updates from us. Your system will continue to operate fine in it’s current state.

You may remove subscription-manager altogether (using rpm -e or dnf remove), or you can use subscription-manager itself:

subscription-manager unregister

You can also reconfigure subscription-manager and simply register against another RHSMD-offering distribution/vendor.

We are keen to serve our infrastructure far and wide; but we are not going to be upset if you opt out.