Host metadata reporting and "Last Checkin" date

Support
1

Problem:
I had a dozen Debian and Ubuntu hosts registered against Foreman, all of which were showing values in the “Installable Updates” column for outstanding packages.

I then created a new Org, unregistered 5 hosts and re-registered them against the new org.
After re-registration none of these 5 hosts show any data under Installable Updates column.

I’ve also noticed that the “Last Checkin” date for these hosts doesn’t appear to change unless I manually run one of the apt callbacks:
/sbin/katello-tracer-upload
/usr/bin/package-profile-upload

Does anyone have any ideas as to how to debug and fix both the metadata reporting and ensure that “Last Checkin” date updates consistently for all hosts?

Foreman and Proxy versions:
Foreman 3.15.0-1, Katello 4.17.1-1

Distribution and version:
RHEL 9.6

2

Checkins are by default every 4 hours. This is configured in /etc/rhsm/rhsm.conf under cert_check_interval. It’s rhsmcertd that actually checks in.

On checkin, it should be sending a package profile. This package profile is used to calculate installable updates. If your new org does not give the host access to the same content as the old org, your installable updates will be different.

In order to have the same installable updates, you would have to ensure

  1. The host has access to the same content it did in the old org
  2. The content is synced in the new org
  3. Any relevant custom repositories are overridden to Enabled
  4. The host’s assigned content view in the new org grants access to the content
  5. The host has uploaded a package profile, either thru manual command or regular checkin. (You can confirm this via the “Last Checkin”.)
3

Hi Jeremy,

Thank you for confirming.
For the Check In issue it appears that the rhsmcertd service was not enabled or running on affected hosts. The fact that it was enabled on some hosts and not others is confusing, is it supposed to be automatically started by subscription-manager when a client is registered against Foreman?

For the metadata display issue, the new org has identical content views and repositories as the old org (created and populated via Ansible playbook). The problem appeared to be some kind of cache bug at the Foreman end.

The problem appears to have resolved after upgrading from Katello 4.16 to 4.18.

Thank you for your help :slight_smile:

1 Like
4

My understanding is it’s supposed to always be enabled by subscription-manager, regardless of if it’s registered to Foreman or RHSM.