Red Hat Satellite: Create and Publish Content Views for RHEL + OpenStack

March 18, 2019 / Christopher Paquin / Leave a comment

Overview

In this post I will review the process of creating Content Views (CV), Composite Content Views (CCV), publishing each view, and creating lifecycles.

Note that in this post we are working with Red Hat Satellite 6.4, in which there was a major overhaul of the WebUI. You may have noticed that all menus are now situated on in a pane on the left, rather than at the top of each page.

Sync Plans

A sync plan is a constant, scheduled synchronization of updates of a Red Hat Satellite repository and the source repositories. I suggest syncing either daily or weekly in order to minimize the deltas between each sync. When you sync more often, the amount of change between syncs is less and therefore should complete faster than a monthly sync.

Note that this step assumes that you have already setup the correct repositories for RHEL and Red Hat OpenStack. A list of required repositories can be found in the Red Hat OpenStack Director Installation and Usage Guide.

Navigate to Content > Sync Plans

Here we create a daily sync plan for RHEL 7.

We now add RHEL 7 as the product.

Now we need to create a daily sync plan for Red Hat OpenStack.

Note: you might need to create a sync plan for Ceph as well. Ensure all plans sync at the same interval.

Create a Content View

Now we need to create our content views. We will create one for RHEL, and one for OSP. If you are using ceph, you will need to create a content view for it as well.

Continue reading →

RHEL7: Registering a System with the Red Hat Network Using Subscription Manager

March 28, 2015 / Christopher Paquin / 1 Comment

Note that I am about to give you the simpletons version of registering a system. Expect nothing fancy below. In this post I will do my best to keep it brief.

If you need to register newly build RHEL 7 system using Subscription Manger rather than the ‘rhn_register’ command (which is pretty much deprecated) you will need to run the command as shown below. Including the option “–auto-attach“ is pretty much the simplest method to register with RHN, as you do not need to keep track of any of your subscription names.

[root@rhel7 ~]# subscription-manager register –username <username> –password <password> –auto-attach

Once auto-attached you can log into rhn.redhat.com, and use the WebUI to pick and choose any additional subscriptions that you want to attach.

Once you have attached as many subscriptions as your heart desires (or you are licensed for) ,you can then run the following command to see each and every yum repository that you have access to, even if they are disabled.

[root@rhel7 ~]# yum repolist all

Depending on the number of repos that you have access to, so you might want to narrow the list down a bit, as shown below.

[root@rhel7 ~]# yum repolist all | grep -i openstack-6

rhel-7-server-openstack-6.0-debug-rpms/7Server/x86_64 disabled
rhel-7-server-openstack-6.0-installer-debug-rpms/7Server/x86_64 disabled
rhel-7-server-openstack-6.0-installer-rpms/7Server/x86_64 disabled
rhel-7-server-openstack-6.0-installer-source-rpms/7Server/x86_64 disabled
rhel-7-server-openstack-6.0-rpms/7Server/x86_64 disabled
rhel-7-server-openstack-6.0-source-rpms/7Server/x86_64 disabled

Now you can enable the repos that you need with the command below. Note that the enable option accepts wildcards, but also note the discrepancy in the repo names in the command output above, and in the command below. If you are not passing a wildcard option on the enable command, then you will need to modify the repo names before you can run your command with any bit of success.

[root@rhel7 ~]# subscription-manager repos –enable rhel-7-server-openstack-6.0*
Repository ‘rhel-7-server-openstack-6.0-rpms’ is enabled for this system.
Repository ‘rhel-7-server-openstack-6.0-source-rpms’ is enabled for this system.
Repository ‘rhel-7-server-openstack-6.0-debug-rpms’ is enabled for this system.
Repository ‘rhel-7-server-openstack-6.0-installer-debug-rpms’ is enabled for this system.
Repository ‘rhel-7-server-openstack-6.0-installer-source-rpms’ is enabled for this system.
Repository ‘rhel-7-server-openstack-6.0-installer-rpms’ is enabled for this system.

Yum: Under the Covers with GPG Keys

July 14, 2014November 28, 2014 / Christopher Paquin

Hey look at this spooky key. Don't be frightened little one. Nothing scary is going to happen to you here. This is a safe place. As a matter of fact, if you stick around you might just learn a thing or two. A thing or two about GPG!

First off do any of us really know what GPG stands for? Well yes we do! It stands for GNU Privacy Guard. RPM Package creators use GPG to apply a digital signature to their packages. If a package was tampered with, then its GPG signature will no longer match what was placed in the original package.

First off to check what keys you have installed on your Linux server you can run the following rpm command as show in the example below.

[root@ip-172-31-22-45 ~]# rpm -qa gpg-pubkey
gpg-pubkey-0608b895-4bd22942
gpg-pubkey-fd431d51-4ae0493b
gpg-pubkey-2fa658e0-45700c69

Neet I have three keys installed. But lets say want to install another one. Well I can do so with the command below. In this example I have navigated to /etc/pki/rpm-gpg and am going to install the redhat beta key on my server.

[root@ip-172-31-22-45 rpm-gpg]# rpm –import RPM-GPG-KEY-redhat-beta

Hey that was fun. Now lets get our hands a bit dirtier.

Want to get more information on a specific key. Then this command is your huckleberry. Here you can see that this is the pubkey for the EPEL repo.

[root@ip-172-31-22-45 rpm-gpg]# rpm -qi gpg-pubkey-0608b895-4bd22942
Name        : gpg-pubkey                   Relocations: (not relocatable)
Version     : 0608b895                          Vendor: (none)
Release     : 4bd22942                      Build Date: Sat 14 Jun 2014 09:13:58 AM EDT
Install Date: Sat 14 Jun 2014 09:13:58 AM EDT      Build Host: localhost
Group       : Public Keys                   Source RPM: (none)
Size        : 0                                License: pubkey
Signature   : (none)
Summary     : gpg(EPEL (6) <epel@fedoraproject.org>)
Description :

To verify signature of a downloaded package, use the rpm command as shown below. In this example I have highlighted the key that was used to sign this package.

# rpm -vK nautilus-dropbox-1.6.0-1.fedora.i386.rpm
nautilus-dropbox-1.6.0-1.fedora.i386.rpm:
    Header V3 RSA/SHA1 Signature, key ID 5044912e: OK
    Header SHA1 digest: OK (a4d51906633f92913db075ba33946f50999c245e)
    V3 RSA/SHA1 Signature, key ID 5044912e: OK
    MD5 digest: OK (1b8ff7abc18f68bf274e24fc57fd3a87)

Using the bolded information in the example above, I can then use this information to track down the exact key that was used to sign the package.