I have lots of RHEL 5 servers subscribed to a Satellite 5.3 server (I know it's all old, not my choice). After I register servers, many of them seem to fall out and become inactive and require reregistration. This used to affect almost all our servers until I realized the NTP server we were using was way off (also not my choice) but I was able to rectify that and so now this only affects a few dozen. But I can't find a source and there are practically no log entries giving hints as to the problem.
2 Answers
The best way to ensure RHEL clients stay continually connected to an RHN Satellite server is to run the OSAD daemon (osad
) on each client and osa-dipatcher
on the Satellite server.
You can install OSAD on the clients by subscribing them to the rhn-tools
channel and running:
yum install osad`
chkconfig osad on
service osad start
On the RHN Satellite server, just make sure the osa-dipatcher package is installed and that the service is running.
More simply you can create a cron job on the clients to periodically check in with the Satellite server. Something like the following would do great:
#!/bin/sh
# Check for scheduled actions
perl -le 'sleep rand 9000' && rhn_check >& /dev/null
# send latest system info
perl -le 'sleep rand 9000' && rhn-profile-sync >& /dev/null
Lastly, if a client ever stops checking in, just run rhn_check
manually for troubleshooting purposes.
Hope this helps!

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There is a native tool implemented - rhnsd. It does the same - performs "rhn_check" every 240 mins. or whatever is set in /etc/sysconfig/rhn/rhnsd

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