Installing a Novell SUSE Subscription Management Tool (SMT) Server

Before we start installing SMT we have to have to following:

• A SLES 11 server
• The media for SMT SLE11 (downloaded here). This is a ISO file, in this document we assume we have this ISO in /tmp

Step 1 Installing SMT

1. In Yast goto Software | Add-On Products
2. Click on Add and choose the media where you want to install form. In our case this is a ISO file in /tmp
3. Accept the License Agreement and proceed with the installation

Step 2 Configuration Wizard
In this section where going to configure the settings for SMT. Make sure you now the following :

• NCC Mirroring Credentials (you can find these on the Customer Portal from Novell)
• NCC email address (this one you must know ;-))

So now the configuration.

1. Select Enable Subscription Management Tool Service (SMT)
2. Select Open Port in Firewall (if you use the firewall on your SLES 11 host)
3. Provide the NCC Mirroring Credentials (you can test them by clicking on the Test button (Duh!))
4. Provide the NCC E-mail Used for Registration
5. If you want you can give another (generic) URL for your SMT server. This URL is used by all your other servers. In my case this is instsrv01.wilmsen.lan
6. Click on Next
7. Provide a Database Password for the SMT user
8. Click on Add to provide a E-mail address where the reports are send to
9. Click on Next
10. If you haven’t registered this server in NCC, you can this now by selecting Register in Novell Customer Center and click on Next. If you have done this before the installation of SMT you can skip this step.
11. After this the setting are written to the configuration and you can continue to select for witch products you want to download updates.

Step 3 Select product to download updates for

1. Start Yast2 and select SMT Server Management
2. Select the products where you want to download updates for and click on Toggle Mirroring
3. Select OK
4. To kick of a manual mirror open a terminal and give the command smt-mirror. The patches will be downloaded in /srv/www/htdocs/

Step 4 Enabling SSL for Apache
We want to download patches to a secure channel. Therefor we have to enable SSL for our webserver (Apache).

1. In Yast2 select HTTP Server
2. If this is the first time, go through the wizard and click Finish. After this select HTTP server again
3. Go to the Server Modules tab and find under the section Name SSL
4. Click on Toggle Status and click Finish

Step 5 Registering Server to SMT
In this step we are going to register (other) server to our SMT server.

1. You can register a client by using the clientSetup4SMT.sh script. You can download this script from your SMT server.
   You can use wget to download the script: wget http://servername/repo/tools/clientSetup4SMT.sh
2. Make the script executable: chmod +x clientSetup4SMT.sh
3. Start the script: ./clientSetup4SMT.sh
4. You’re asked to accept the SSL certificate. Give a Y to accept
5. Press Y to register this server to your SMT server

Now your server is registered on you SMT server. Is you look in Yast in your software repositories you will see there is a extra channel.

Step 6 Preform a onetime manual download of patches

By default a cron job is added in /etc/cron.d so patches are download daily. If you don’t want this remove the job. You can wait a day before the patches are downloaded or you can give the command smt-mirror to do a manual download.

That’s all!