Subscriptions

Classically, you create an account on https://linux.last-bastion.net/register and then subscribe to the required software channels for the machine instance via this account.

For our cloud/marketplace instances, our Subscription Manager automatically configures subscriptions and yum repositories from our entitlements platform using cloud-init’s subscription manager module.

We use vanilla Red Hat tools to do this; and you can easily configure additional RPM repositories from other vendors.

How it works

Repository management is via the configuration in /etc/yum.repos.d/redhat.repo. This file is auto-managed via the subscription-manager suite’s rhsmcertd daemon. You may turn subscription management off; or edit the configuration in /etc/rhsm/rhsm.conf to manage this elsewhere; but if you do wish to continue accessing updates to your Marketplace product; you should leave all of this alone.

When your system is registered; it will have retrieved entitlements X509 certificates

To verify your systems registration:

$ subcription-manager status

Your account will be flagged as SCA (Simple Content Access); and while you can continue to consume entitlements; you would need to engage with us to consume subscriptions outside cloud Marketplaces.

When your system registers; we ship two different types of certificate; (i) an identity certificate; which is placed in /etc/pki/consumer/{cert,key}.pem; which identifies this host; and then (ii) entitlement certificate(s) for the product(s) on your system in /etc/pki/entitlement/<serial>.pem.

The product certificates (in /etc/pki/product) are baked by us into each image; being the configured ‘product’ we ship.

If you no longer have any valid entitlements; there will be no certs in /etc/pki/entitlement.

Manual Registration

You will not automagically have/receive a username/password to our customer portal. We use the organisation/activation key method instead. For Marketplace; we use your Cloud account number as your organisation; and activation key is based upon the Marketplace/product you chose.

Our Marketplace tool provides a convenient wrapper around subscription-manager to perform a registration with the appropriate details:

$ marketplace set rhsm

An equivalent subscription-manager call would be something like:

$ subscription-manager register --org <accno> --activationkey <product> [--insecure]

It seems the SSL handshake is done using a/the identity certificate; which you most probably are yet to receive; in which case; use the –insecure option.

Subscription vs Entitlement

What we outlined above is actually entitlements. Essentially, we are auto-managing these on our Cloud Marketplaces; as the Provider is collecting subscriptions on our behalf.

We can upgrade you to our Subscriptions. This will turn off all of your simple content access, and instead automatically move you to our License pool infrastructure.

We set you up with a default pool; but you should claim your org and the we can manage this on our Portal.

All of your installed products must be current in their subscription status (Status Subscribed in subscription-manager list).

We no longer support the deprecated subscription-manager attach entitlement to pool feature.

Support

Before contacting us; make sure you are able to identity your organisation and the system/consumer in question:

$ subscription-manager identity

These details are required to complete our support form.