5 Managing Client Machines with SMT

5.1 Listing Registered Clients
5.2 Deleting Registrations
5.3 Manual Registration of Clients at SUSE Customer Center
5.4 Scheduling Periodic Registrations of Clients at SUSE Customer Center
5.5 Compliance Monitoring

SMT lets you register and manage client machines on SUSE Customer Center. Client machines must be configured to use SMT. For information about configuring clients to use SMT, see Chapter 8, Configuring Clients to Use SMT.

5.1 Listing Registered Clients #

To list SMT-registered client machines, use the smt-list-registrations command. The following information is listed for each client: its Unique ID, Hostname, date and time of Last Contact with the SMT server, and the Software Product the client uses.

5.2 Deleting Registrations #

To delete a registration from SMT and SUSE Customer Center, use the following command. To delete multiple registrations, the option -g can be used several times.

smt-delete-registration -g Client_ID

The ID of the client machine to be deleted can be determined from the output of the smt-list-registrations command.

5.3 Manual Registration of Clients at SUSE Customer Center #

The smt-register command registers clients at SUSE Customer Center. All clients that are currently not registered or whose data has changed since the last registration are registered.

To register clients whose registration has failed, use the --reseterror option. This option resets the SCC registration error flag and tries to submit failed registrations again.

5.4 Scheduling Periodic Registrations of Clients at SUSE Customer Center #

SMT module allows for the easy scheduling of client registrations. In the default configuration, registrations are scheduled to repeat every 15 minutes. To create or modify a new registration schedule, follow these steps:

Start YaST SMT Configuration module (yast2 smt-server).
Go to the Scheduled SMT Job.
Select any SCC Registration job and click Edit if you want to change its schedule.
To create a new registration schedule, click Add and select SCC Registration as Job to Run.
Choose the Frequency of the scheduled SMT job. You can perform jobs Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Periodically (every n-th hour or every m-th minute).
Set the Job Start Time by entering the Hour and Minute or, in case of periodic frequency, the relevant periods. For weekly and monthly schedules, select the Day of the Week or the Day of the Month the mirroring should occur.
Note: Lowest Registration Frequency
Do not set the frequency lower than 10 minutes, because the maximum value of the rndRegister is 450 (7.5 minutes). If the frequency is lower, it may occur that the started process is still sleeping when the next process starts. In this case, the second request will exit.
Click either OK or Add and Finish.

Scheduling of SMT jobs in general is covered in Section 2.5, “Setting the SMT Job Schedule with YaST”.

YaST uses cron to schedule SUSE Customer Center registrations and other SMT jobs. If you do not want to use YaST, use cron directly.

To disable automatic registration, change the forwardRegistration value in the [LOCAL] section of the /etc/smt.conf configuration file to false.

5.5 Compliance Monitoring #

To assist customers in monitoring their license compliance, SMT generates a weekly report based on data from SMT and SUSE Customer Center. This report contains information about statistics of the registered machines, products used, and of the active, expiring or missing license subscriptions. If subscriptions are about to expire and/or more SUSE Linux Enterprise machines are registered than you have purchased licenses for, the report contains relevant warnings.

In order to calculate the compliance, the smt-report tool by default downloads information about the subscriptions and registrations (can be disabled).

You can configure the recipient addresses for the reports on the Database and Reporting tab of the YaST Subscription Management Tool configuration module. All of the e-mail configuration options are located in the [REPORT] section of /etc/smt.conf and explained in Section 7.2.1.6, “[REPORT] Section of /etc/smt.conf”.

The scheduling of the reports is configured in /etc/cron.d/novell.com-smt while the parameters to use with the cron jobs are in the REPORT_PARAMS section of /etc/smt.d/smt-cron.conf.

To describe the content of the reports is beyond the scope of this section, but a set of reports can be split into five individual parts. By default, these reports are attached as individual files to the mail on the weekly report run. The alerts report is a normal text file while the others are in CSV format. The reports can also be created in PDF or XML by specifying --pdf or --xml as output format.

To generate a set of reports in CSV files based on local data and to display them in the standard output, run the following command:

Tip

The example stores the reports in the /root directory. You can change it to any other safe and writable directory.

smt-report --local --csv --file /root/smt-local-rep

The command generates the following files:

/root/smt-local-rep-product_subscription_active.csv
/root/smt-local-rep-product_subscription_alerts.txt
/root/smt-local-rep-product_subscription_expired.csv
/root/smt-local-rep-product_subscription_expiresoon.csv
/root/smt-local-rep-product_subscription_summary.csv

Note: Multiple SMT Servers

If you have multiple SMT servers deployed in your environment, the reports may not represent all of the SMT servers or machines in your environment. For the complete statistics of all your registered machines, refer to the information provided by SUSE Customer Center.

For more information about types of reports, output formats, and targets refer to Chapter 6, SMT Reports.

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