Single System based integration

As the diskless shared root cluster provides a filesystem based single system image. The whole cluster can be integrated into Red Hat Network as one server.

In order to register the single system image into the RedHat Network, make sure the directory /etc/sysconfig/rhn is shared for all cluster nodes and do all required RHN registration steps for one server.

Server based integration

As all nodes in the diskless shared root cluster can also be seen as individual cluster nodes, all servers can be integrated into the RedHat Network as individual units.

In order to register /etc/sysconfig/rhn is hostdependent and do all required RHN registration steps for all servers in the cluster.

In order to make /etc/sysconfig/rhn hostdependent do the following task:

# com-mkcdsl -a /etc/sysconfig/rhn

Single System based Software Management

In a Single System based integration into RHN, the software needs only to be installed on the registered server. All other servers in the cluster will be able to use the new or updated software package at once.

Server based Software Management

In the case, a Server based integration into RHN is used, the software only needs to be installed on one registered server in the cluster, whereas all other cluster members should update their package information for their RHN system profile. The following command should be used to update the package information:

# up2date --packages

Single System based

When the single system image of the diskless shared root cluster is registered inside the RHN, the following guidelines have to be taken into account for configuration file management:

• Hostdependent configuration files have to be maintained at their real location on the filesystem. I.e. if we'd assume, that /etc/sysconfig/network is hostdependent and maintained within the RHN, the following files have to be added to the RHN configuration management:

  /cluster/cdsl/{1,2...,N}/etc/sysconfig/network

• Hostdependent RHN configuration file macros should not be used in this kind of configuration. E.g. the hostname will allways be the same for all nodes (I.e. the hostname the registered system image instance had at registration time)

Server based

When all nodes of the diskless shared root cluster have been registered into the RHN, the following guidelines have to be taken into account for configuration file management:

• Hostdependent configuration files have to be maintained at their real location on the filesystem. I.e. if we'd assume, that /etc/sysconfig/network is hostdependent and maintained within the RHN, the following file has to be added to the RHN configuration management:

  /cdsl.local/etc/sysconfig/network

• Hostdependent configuration file macros can be used in this kind of configuration.

How to change the "unknown" hostname in RHN Satellite for a system

When the hostname of a system isn't set (for instance during installation) and the system is registered in RHN Satellite, it creates a system entry with "unknown" as the profile name. This can be changed later on within the interface of RHN Satellite. But in System info the Hostname field stays at unknown, and it seems that this doesn't get changed afterwards. Just give the system it's ip-address, hostname and domainname and run up2date --hardware. It seems that this will read it's information out of /etc/hosts, but the most important thing is that those anoying "unknown" hostname's are gone. regards to mizmo for this one.

To accomplish the same thing on a RHEL 5 client, run rhn-profile-sync

How can I update the packages associated with this System Profile on Red Hat Network

up2date --packages

How can I execute a command on all cluster nodes ?

You can use com-dsh <command> to execute <command> on all cluster nodes.