John wrote:
> Hi guys.
>
> How do I assign a specific RHN contract to a specific host?
> As of now I have a big pile of licenses on my RHN but I need to specify
> which servers has which licenses due to a different cost organization (when
> renewal).
>
> For me this looks not possible but do I really need to have a seperat RHN
> account for each department paying? That would give me a whole lot more
> accounts to keep track of. How do you manage your licenses?
>
>

I keep a folder with the licenses for each host in it. The RHN tools are, in
most circumstances, not actually useful for updating or managing the systems.
The system updates can be downloaded quite successfully to a single licensed
server of each architecture, loaded into a local yum repository, and more
conventional yum tools used to mange updates in a far faster, more reliable,
and less bandwidth consuming way than with up2date or the 'up2date in granny's
nightgown', yum-rhn-plugin. The systems are licensed, we have the contact
information for them, we don't abuse the licenses, and normally, it's none of
RedHat's business which machine has what license.

Doing this also allows the use of 'mock' to do local chroot cage software
building without having to duplicate licenses, installation of all the updates
from the local repository at kickstart time before the license can be
registered online and without contact with the Internet at large, and you can
firewall all but the update mirror entirely from the outside world. And that
update mirror can have its own, locally built versions of older packages
properly managed by yum, where the yum-rhn-plugin entirely ignores most of the
yum options except 'exclude', and does not allow you to exclude specifically
from the RedHat repositories.

It's nasty: someone at RedHat made very, very bad choices in implemnenting
yum-rhn-plugin.