SUSE Manager Client registration

Step by step procedure to add a new client in SUSE Manager.

In this article, we will walk you through step by step procedure to register a client in SUSE Manager. The complete process can be split into 5 parts as below where first 4 are pre-requisite –

• Create custom channels
• Create Activation Keys
• Create bootstrap scripts
• Create bootstrap repo
• Register client

If you already have an established SUSE Manager in your infra then the first 4 steps must have been already completed and configured. Let’s go one by one now –

Create custom channels

We already covered it in another article here.

Create Activation Keys

For this step, we will use dev channel we created in the previous step. So we will create Activation Key (AK) for channel year-1-dev-SLE-Product-SLES15-Pool for x86_64

Navigate to Systems > Activation Keys

Hit Create Key button

Create Activation Key

I next screen there are 3 important fields you need to fill in –

1. Key : which starts with 1-. Rest you need to fill in some standard format so that its easier for you to identify later. We used 1-dev-sles15 here
2. Base Channel: You need to select the proper custom channels from the drop-down menu. Here custom channels created by Content Lifecycle Management and SUSE product channels will be listed. Choose wisely.
3. Child channels: Select child channels from your main base custom channel.

Activation key creation options

Leave rest to default. Every option has help text as well which will help you to understand it and its pretty simple. Finally, click Create Activation Key button at the bottom of the page.

Your key will be created and can be checked at the Activation Keys home menu we visited in the first step.

Create bootstrap scripts

Don’t worry you don’t have to script the code on your own. SUSE Manager got you covered. You just need to edit Activation Key in the ready-made script.

Navigate to Admin > Manager Configuration > Bootstrap Script

Here you can see the location of bootstrap script located in your SUSE Manager along with few options like a proxy (mainly) which can be tweaked. Make sure to hit Update button at bottom of the page to generate a script on the mentioned location for the first time before you use it.

Bootstrap script location on SUSE Manager

As you can see the bootstrap script is located in /srv/www/htdocs/pub/bootstrap on SUSE Manager. Log in to the SUSE Manager server using putty and make a copy of the script.

And in the copy edit below parameter to your Activation key.

That’s it. Your bootstrap script is ready to register client under dev channel.

Create bootstrap repo

Now, you need to create a bootstrap repo as well. This repo will be added to the client temporarily to fetch all SUSE Manager registration-related packages and their dependent packages so that registration can be initiated on the client. All this happens in the background when you run the bootstrap script on the client.

To create bootstrap repo run below command on SUSE Manager. Make sure all SUSE product repos are synced completely before running this command –

Make sure you edit command and choose OS distribution as per your channel you are selecting. We are working on dev SLES15 channel here so I chose SLE-15-x86_64 product in command.

You can see it copies all packages and their dependencies to the new repo for new clients. Sample output :

Register client to SUSE Manager

And we came to the last step for which we have been sweating on all the above pre-requisite!

Its a very simple one command step to be executed on the client machine. The client can be registered from the SUSE Manager console itself as well. We will see both steps here.

Before that one point to note – If your system is VM built from template or clone or if it’s a clone system in any way then you should run below commands on client systems to assign unique system Id and then proceed with registration.

These commands will also wipe out any previous salt registration details if any from the clone procedure.

Register client to SUSE Manager from client putty login

Login to client machine which you want to register with SUSE Manager with the root account. Run command :

curl -Sks https://<suse-manager>/pub/bootstrap/<bootstrap-script>.sh | /bin/bash

Where –

• <suse-manager> is SUSE Manager IP or hostname
• <bootstrap-script> is bootstrap script name you prepared in the earlier step

As per our setup below is a command –

It will do all the work for you and once the script finishes the execution you should see the client’s key is pending for approval in the SUSE Manager console. Unless you approve it, the client won’t be registered to SUSE Manager. Script has a long output so I am not mentioning it here.

To approve client key navigate to SUSE Manager > Salt > Keys

Accept salt client in SUSE Manager

Click the tick button and your client is registered! It will be shown as accepted in Salt then. You can view it under SUSE Manager > Systems > Overview

System Overview in SUSE Manager

You can system is registered in SUSE Manager under dev channel!

To view more details about the system, click on hostname and you will see client details along with a tabbed menu bar which will help you manage that client from the SUSE Manager console.

Client details in SUSE Manager

Register client to SUSE Manager from the console itself

You can provide SSH login to the SUSE Manager console and it will do all the above steps which you need to do manually by logging into the client using putty.

Navigate to SUSE Manager > Systems > Bootstrapping

Bootstrapping client from SUSE Manager

Fill in details and hit Bootstrap button. It will start connecting system via SSH in backend and execute stuff. On console you will be shown message Your system is bootstrapping: waiting for a response..

Once completed, your system is registered and you can view it in system overview as explained above. You need not accept key in this case since SUSE Manager auto approves this salt request.

Issue of RHEL/OEL clients

I observed a peculiar problem where patch update tasks are sitting idle in a pending state for a long time and not being picked up by the client.

It shows in SUSE Manager GUI that –

and it sits there and does nothing.

The solution is to run rhn_check -vvvv on the client machine for which the job is stuck on SUSE Manager. It will be checked, picked up and executed!