8.7. Enabling Push to Clients

In addition to allowing client systems to regularly poll the Satellite for scheduled actions, users can enable the Satellite to immediately initiate those actions on provisioning-entitled systems. This bypasses the typical delay between scheduling an action and the client system retrieving the action from Red Hat Network. The OSA dispatcher (osa-dispatcher) provides support for this feature.

OSA dispatcher is a service that periodically runs a query to check the Red Hat Satellite server for any commands to execute on the client. If any actions exist, it sends a message through jabberd to the osad instances running on the clients.

To use this feature, first configure your firewall rules to allow connections on the required port(s), as described in Section 2.4, “Additional Requirements”.

Install the osa-dispatcher package, which is contained in the Red Hat Satellite software channel for on the Customer Portal. Once installed, start the service on the Satellite as root using the following command:

service osa-dispatcher start

Finally, install the osad package on all client systems to receive pushed actions. Find this package within the Red Hat Network Tools child channel on the Red Hat Satellite.

Once installed, start the service on the client systems as root using the command:

service osad start

Like other services, osa-dispatcher and osad accept stop, restart, and status commands, as well.

This feature depends on client systems recognizing the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the Satellite. The client systems use this name and not the IP address of the server when configuring the Red Hat Update Agent. See the Red Hat Satellite Client Configuration Guide for more details.

Now when you schedule actions from the Red Hat Satellite to any push-enabled system, the task begins immediately rather than waiting for the system to check with Red Hat Network.