Subscription manager, katello agents, Remote Execution

Community
#1

Problem:
Might not be a problem but require some advice. Currently I am using subscription manager to monitor my servers updates. I know the Katello agent is on its way out so that is not part of my plan anymore. But will remote execution also report what updates are outstanding? or is is only if I use subscription manager?

Expected outcome:
As a first phase of my project I only want servers to report what packages are outstanding, currently with subscription manager its a bit overkill as I am using it as a repo as well.

Foreman and Proxy versions:
3.1

Foreman and Proxy plugin versions:
Foreman-tasks = 5.2.0
foreman_remote_execution = 5.0.1
katello = 4.3.0.rc4

Distribution and version:
Rocky 8.5

Other relevant data:

#2

I believe the functionality is built into subscription-manager. Every time you install/update/remove packages, information is sent to Katello. Then outstanding updates get calculated based on that and the repositories.

So katello-agent and remote execution are not needed for that to work. However, if you want to install/update/remove packages on the host from Katello server, then that is done either via katello-agent or now remote execution.

#3

Do you perhaps know if you can use the subscription manager but not use the repos on pulp? For example a local mirror

#4

Not sure I understand the question. You can use local repos and Katello repos at the same time. subscription-manager only touches the redhat.repo file and sends list of installed packages to Katello. That way Katello can calculate errata centrally for reports, or initiating updates centrally.

If you want to do your own thing without Katello, then take a look at dnf check-update and dnf updateinfo.

1 Like
#5

@rgp, with the subscription manager it only touches the redhat.repo file and you can still use other repo files but if Katello is offline you will still get errors on the local machine and have to manually remove the redhat.repo file before updating a system.

Do you perhaps know of any way to use subscription manager but if katello is offline it will not give you all the fail messages when trying to do an update?

#6

You can disable repos selectively when running yum/dnf commands with --disablerepo="<repo id>". Wildcards are supported. Katello repo ids usually start with the organization name, so Orgname* would match all of them.

You can also disable/enable them via subscription-manage repos, yum-config-manager, etc. Or modify the repo file by adding enabled=0, which is the command do. Technically, subscription-manager also marks the change centrally in Katello, since it can be controlled centrally too.

#7

Yeah that is correct, with manually changing the value to 0 it will just change again after checkin.

Do you know if its possible to disable it from the foreman ui but still get all the errata information?