Registering a content host with Satellite

Satellite 6.4
Red Hat Satellite

In our previous articles, we covered getting Satellite up and running, setting up content views, activation keys, initial repository syncs. Today we will discuss registering a content host with Satellite. There are various options of getting servers added within your Satellite environment. One way is to provision the server via Satellite, something that we will cover at a later time, or you can just register an already provisioned server. I installed a RHEL 7.5 server in KVM, setup the DNS information. This brought me to the starting point. I did not register this server with Red Hat, as the goal is to register the server with Satellite.

Registering a Content Host

Upon first logging into Satellite, we look at Host > Content Hosts and we see that currently, we have no content hosts. Satellite makes the registration process easy with the Register Content Host button. Lets begin by clicking this button.

Content Host, currently we have none.

You are now presented with a step by step guild required to register our content host with Satellite. The first step is to install the katello-ca-consumer rpm from our Satellite server.

Satellite gives us the steps needed to register a host.

Downloading with curl

We use curl to retrieve the RPM from the pub directory on our Satellite 6.4 server.

curl command to download the katello-ca-consumer rpm.

Then we just need to do a yum localinstall to install the rpm on our host.

yum local install to prepare the content host.

Upon completion we can run the following commands:

# subscription-manager status
# subscription-manager identity

This will verify to us that we are registered and connected to our Satellite server.

registering the server with our activation key.

Installing katello tools

The next steps is installing the various katello tools so that Satellite can manage our content host properly. I recommend installing all three katello rpms onto your content host.

The final steps with installing katello agent tools

We start with katello-host-tools.

installing katello-host-tools

Next we can install katello-host-tools-tracer

installing katello-host-tools-tracer.

Finally, we install katello-agent, which will allow Satellite to track patching, status, and errata status of our content host.

installing katello-agent

Verifying the content host on Satellite

Once all the installation is finished we can check Hosts, and we see it requires updates.

GUI in Satellite on hosts shows we need updates.

Looking into Content Hosts we are able to see numerous updates available for our new content host.

Content Hosts shows exactly how many updates are required.

Running yum update on the content host

Therefore, we run yum update on our server to start the update process.

running yum update to patch our server.

We see we have quite a few packages (as we installed RHEL 7.5 and Red Hat has 7.6 available at this time).

Yum update progressing

It will take a while to do the full upgrade.

It takes a while to upgrade so much.

Once the updates have finished, we can continue.

yum update completing.

Rebooting the content host

As the kernel was update, we need to reboot. So run the following:

# systemctl reboot
rebooting the server after a kernel update

Content Host is now registered and updated

Once the server is back online, we can go back to Content Hosts and we see that all the installable updates show as 0 now.

Content Host now shows no updates required.

Clicking on the server name we can see further information on the content host. We see we are locked to RHEL 7, we are using CV-RHEL7 as the content view, and our lifecycle is Dev.

A more detailed look at our content host.

That’s all there is to it. We can now manage our content host with Satellite. In future articles we will cover topics such as provisioning servers with Satellite. We still need to build us a new Capsule server within AWS, and then provision and manage content hosts within AWS EC2.

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Ivan Windon

Ivan Windon is a Site Reliability Engineer at IBM. Ivan is actively engaged in Cloud Technologies with AWS, Google, and Azure. Ivan has extensive experience with Linux and Windows administration, DNS, Networking, IDM, and Security. In his free time, he enjoys being with his wife and two children. The family enjoys hiking, and traveling when able. His favorite locations are Yosemite NPS, and San Francisco, California.

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3 Responses

  1. snehal says:

    nice article, waiting for more 🙂 thank you!! now my concept is clear.
    for some reason I m unable to subscribe to this website, it says failed to open page.

  2. Vel Murugan K says:

    Nice article, It given lot information. Thank you!

  3. Anonymous says:

    Thank you for taking time and sharing, I have pretty good understanding of satellite now.

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