4.4. Registering, Unregistering, and Reregistering a System

Entitlements are managed by organizing and maintaining the systems which use entitlement subscriptions. The entitlements and subscriptions are managed by Red Hat through the subscription service. A system is recognized to the subscription service by being registered with the service. The subscription service assigns the system (called a consumer) a unique ID (essentially as an inventory number) and issues that system an identifying certificate (with the UUID in its subject CN) to identify that system.

Whenever a subscription is purchased by an organization, the consumer can subscribe to that subscription. This means that a portion of the subscription is allocated to that consumer ID; when the consumer contacts the content delivery network and downloads the software, the licenses have been already assigned to the system. The system has valid certificates for its subscriptions.

Systems can be registered with an subscription service during the firstboot process or as part of the kickstart setup (both described in the Installation Guide). Systems can also be registered after they have been configured or removed from the subscription service inventory (unregistered) if they will no longer be managed within that entitlement system.

4.4.1. Registering Consumers in the Hosted Environment

For infrastructures which use Red Hat's hosted subscription and content delivery network, all that is required to register the system is the username and password of the Red Hat Network account.

Launch the Red Hat Subscription Manager GUI. For example:
```
subscription-manager-gui
```
If the system is not already registered, then there will be a Register button at the top of the window in the Tools area.
Enter the username and password of the user account on the subscription service; this is the account used to access the Customer Portal.
Optionally, select the Automatically subscribe... checkbox, so that the system is subscribed to the best matched subscription when it is registered. Otherwise, the system must be subscribed manually, as in Section 4.5, “Handling Subscriptions”.