Chapter 10. Entitlement

The new subscription management platform delivers Red Hat subscriptions and software services in a flexible, scalable and secure way. When installing a new Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 system, a user receives X.509 certificates which contain information about which Red Hat products are installed and what subscriptions the machine is consuming. The subscription information includes support levels, expiration dates, Red Hat account numbers, and Red Hat contract numbers. In addition, an X.509 certificate allows a machine to authenticate to the Red Hat Content Delivery Network (CDN). The globally distributed Red Hat Content Delivery Network (CDN) is designed to work even with an outage of the Red Hat systems. Users outside of North America should see improved update speeds and availability with the new system. RHN Classic continues to be the default option for computer registration and for receiving updates.

Red Hat customer portal, in conjunction with new functionality available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2, allows customers to register and subscribe up to 25 machines that are completely disconnected from the Internet. Prior to this enhancement, customers with disconnected systems were not able to receive the benefits of subscription information and tracking from the RHN website. For customers with more than 25 disconnected machines, RHN Satellite continues to be the recommended option at additional cost.

It is now possible to automatically regenerate new entitlement certificates after the renewal of a subscription. Prior to this enhancement, customers were required to manually regenerate the certificate in order to continue receiving software updates and other subscription services. Automatically regenerating a certificate minimizes service interruptions. Users are also notified of cases where auto regeneration of certificates was not successful. For more information, refer to https://www.redhat.com/rhel/renew/faqs/.

In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2, during system registration, the Red Hat Subscription Manager is now used by default.