Chapter 3. Subscription Management
Updated Subscription Manager
Red Hat Subscription Manager has been updated to the latest version, which includes the following notable enhancements:
- When used against Subscription Asset Manager, Subscription Manager now prompts the user for the Organization if it is required to complete registration.
- Subscription Manager now displays the number of subscriptions a user is attaching to a specific machine in the System Registration dialog.
- The Subscription Manager GUI now shows the Organization ID in the System Facts dialog.
- The Red Hat Certificate Tool (rct) now supports tab completion of its primary modules.
- Subscription Manager now sets the
ui_repoid_varssetting with all variables in a given content set. Theui_repoid_varssetting is used to display Yum variables, which are used in thebaseurl,name, and other fields of a Yum repository file. - Subscription Manager can now be configured to not upload package profile data by setting the
report_package_profile = 0setting in the/etc/rhsm/rhsm.conffile.
Enhanced Entitlements Reporting
Red Hat Satellite now integrates with Subscription Asset Manager to provide a rich Enhanced Entitlements Reporting interface that maps your purchased products to systems registered within Satellite. The Red Hat Customer Portal now provides subscription manifests for Satellite 5-registered systems, which are imported into Subscription Asset Manager to provide the new reporting features. This manifest file contains information about the subscriptions available in the Satellite 5 entitlement certificate.
Subscription Asset Manager 1.3
Red Hat Subscription Asset Manager is an on-premise subscription management application. It moves the administration of subscriptions and systems away from the Customer Portal and into the local infrastructure. Along with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.10, a new 1.3 version of Subscription Asset Manager is now available. For more information, refer to the Red Hat Subscription Asset Manager 1.3 Release Notes located at https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/Red_Hat_Subscription_Asset_Manager/.
Red Hat Support Tool
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.10 includes a new package, redhat-support-tool, which provides the Red Hat Support Tool. This tool facilitates console-based access to Red Hat's subscriber services and gives Red Hat subscribers more venues for accessing both the content and services available to them as Red Hat customers. Further, it enables our customers to integrate and automate their helpdesk services with our subscription services. The capabilities of this package include:
- Knowledge Base article and solution viewing from the console (formatted as man pages).
- Viewing, creating, modifying, and commenting on customer cases from the console.
- Attachment uploading directly to a customer case or to ftp://dropbox.redhat.com/ from the console.
- Full proxy support (that is, FTP and HTTP proxies).
- Easy listing and downloading of attachments to customer cases from the console.
- Knowledge Base searching on query terms, log messages, and other parameters, and viewing search results in a selectable list.
- Easy uploading of log files, text files, and other sources to the Shadowman automatic problem determination engine for diagnosis.
- Various other support-related commands.
For more information about the Red Hat Support Tool, refer to the installed documentation in the
/usr/share/doc/redhat-support-tool-version/ directory or the following Knowledge Base article: https://access.redhat.com/site/articles/445443.
