User:Gnyers/SmtAppliance

This appliance contains the Subscription Management Tool on top of SLES11.

What is SMT?

As the documentation states:

"... The Subscription Management Tool 11 for SUSE® Linux Enterprise helps customers manage their SUSE Linux Enterprise software updates while maintaining corporate firewall policy or regulatory compliance requirements.

The Subscription Management Tool is a package proxy system that is integrated with Novell Customer Center and provides key Novell Customer Center capabilities locally at the customer site, thus maintaining all the capabilities of the Novell Customer Center while allowing a more secure centralized deployment."

A few useful links related to SMT:

• SMT Documentation: http://www.novell.com/documentation/smt11/
• SMT FAQ: http://www.novell.com/linux/smt/faq.html
• SMT-NCC FAQ: http://www.novell.com/linux/smt/smt_faq.html
• Subscription Management Tool Master TID (contains links to other TIDs): http://www.novell.com/support/viewContent.do?externalId=7005002

Usage

There are a few configuration steps that need to be taken care of before the appliance actually can mirror repositories from nu.novell.com, e.g. NCC credentials need to be set and a server certificate needs to be created.

Please complete the steps described in the "Get started with your SMT appliance" document (see Appliance Documentation below)

Appliance features

• Contains the SMT 1.1
• The appliance is available as virtual machine, as physical machine image and as bootable CD image
• Documentation is available from the appliance itself
• As a compromize between user friendliness and flexibility, the appliance uses DHCP to configure its IP address, and announces itself through the ZeroConf/Bonjour protocol. It can be reached on the ``smt11.local`` address
• Contains the ``puppet`` client software, so including the appliance in an enterprise configuration management system is easy

Appliance documentation

The appliance itself contains 2 documents:

• Appliance documentation
• Get Started with your SMT appliance

These are accessible through a web browser at http://ApplianceIP/

Changes v0.3.0

• The appliance is now using the official Subscription Management Tool repository directly from the Novell Update service. This repo has previously not been available at SUSE Studio

• The appliance now announces itself using the Zeroconf/Bonjour protocol. Directly connected clients can contact it on the smt11.local address, without changing any DNS related settings.

• Virtualized in a KVM environment, the appliance shuts down gracefully if so requested by the hypervisor.

• There is a described procedure based on `TID 7004986`_ and a helper script to backup all SMT related data. With these it is also possible to migrate the SMT data from an older version appliance to a newer one. See "Appliance Upgrade" document inside the appliance.

• VMware ESX Tools (v. 8.0.2-208167.sles11) removed. The vmware-tools package from the repository "VMware ESX Tools for SLES 11 SP1" has a dependency problem, which causes that it is not usable in this appliance

• Package changes:
  • added packages: acpid, avahi, fping, iputils, puppet, syslog-ng