Chapter 6. Enabling simple content access with Red Hat Satellite

When simple content access is enabled, the subscription management functions of activation keys are obsolete, but the content access functions of the keys are still valid. Creating new activation keys to use with simple content access enables you to design those keys especially for simple content access. It also allows you to preserve the old activation keys in case some business purpose creates a need to revert an allocation from using simple content access back to using the traditional subscription model.

For most use cases, when simple content access is enabled, a single activation key per system (or host) is sufficient to configure content-related attributes, such as repositories and content views. This key replaces the older configuration of activation keys for the traditional subscription model, usually three if recommended configuration steps are followed, that managed both subscription-related and content-related functions.

To create new activation keys, use the following steps, repeating them for the number of new activation keys that are required. You can also perform these steps from the hammer command line interface. The following steps summarize the actions needed to create new activation keys. For more detailed information about these steps, see the Red Hat Satellite documentation.

After the new activation keys are created and configured, use the following steps to update each relevant host group to use the new activation keys. You can also perform these steps from the hammer command line interface.

For Red Hat Satellite 6.9 (or earlier, if you are using an earlier version that is not under full support), the new activation keys that you create for simple content access apply only to newly provisioned hosts. For existing hosts, you must do some reconfiguration and re-enable repositories.

When simple content access is enabled, all repositories are disabled by default if a host does not have a subscription attached. This default setting prevents conflicting repositories from being enabled when a host has access to repositories that span multiple operating system versions.

To do these changes, you can use the following commands as a snippet in a remote job that runs with the remote execution function of Red Hat Satellite. Comments are included in the following snippet to help you understand the series of tasks. You can also run these commands locally on each host, but using the bulk host management and remote execution capabilities of Red Hat Satellite during a maintenance window is more efficient.

# Get a list of all the currently enabled repos
REPOS=$(subscription-manager repos --list-enabled | grep "Repo ID" | cut -f 2 -d ':' )

# (Optional) dump that list to a file in case of errors
echo $REPOS >> ENABLED_REPOS.txt

# Construct a command line to pass to 'subscription-manager repos'
# so that we call it once, instead of once per repo. This would lower the
# number of API calls and load on the Satellite.
CMDLINE=$(echo $REPOS | sed 's/ / --enable /g')

# Disable all the repos & Remove any existing entitlements
subscription-manager repos --disable '*'
subscription-manager remove --all

# Call subscription-manager fresh to ensure that we have a content access cert
# (which is the authorization method when SCA is enabled)
subscription-manager refresh

# Finally (re) enable the correct repos.
subscription-manager repos --enable $CMDLINE