Red Hat Satellite 6.0 - Part 3 - Syncing Repositories

In part 3 of my adventure into installing Red Hat Satellite 6, I am going to be selecting and syncing official Red Hat package repositories.

Selecting Repositories
After logging into the Satellite web interface and making sure your organization is selected, we can start getting some packages sync'd up.  Click on Content > Red Hat Repositories

A list of products should appear.  This list populates based upon the manifest and subscriptions you have attached to the Satellite. If something is missing, you will have to go back to the RH customer portal, make sure the subscription is attached to the satellite and redownload / reimport the manifest.

My environment is RHEL 5 and RHEL 6, so I'm going to be syncing those repositories. A fun new feature of sat 6 is that specific release levels of RHEL can be selected like RHEL 6.4, 5.3 or whatever. In satellite 5, it was very difficult to do this kind of thing to stay compliant with vendor support requirements and security patches.

I'm running RHEL 6.5 and 5.10, so I'm going to sync just those repositories. I think that selecting "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Server RPMs x86_64 6Server" is the latest repository. Since I don't want my systems to start getting RHEL 6.6 stuff when it is released, I'm going to select the following repos to make sure my servers stay at the release level I want them to stay at.

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Server RPMs x86_64 6.5
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Server Kickstart x86_64 6.5
• RHN Tools for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Server RPMs x86_64 6.5
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server Kickstart x86_64 5.10
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server RPMs x86_64 5.10
• RHN Tools for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server RPMs x86_64 5.10

I can always come back here and select other repositories to sync to my organization, but I think this should get me most of what I need for now.

Synchronizing Repositories

In Satellite 5, channels were sync'd by running commands on the command line and then putting those commands into cron jobs so new packages would get downloaded.  However, in Satellite 6, that is no longer the case. Click on Content > Sync Status.

The sync status page should appear. The repositories which were selected before will be listed here.

Selecting repositories and clicking Synchronize Now will start to download packages from Red Hat to the Satellite server. You can click "select all" on the top or do each one separately. The initial sync is going to take a long time for each repository, so I'm going to do one at a time. The page will give you a cool status bar showing progress when clicking the button. Time to go do some other work for a while.

In part 4, I will attempt to create a repository to get the latest VM Ware tools for ESX 5.5 right from VM Ware so I can manage VM Ware tools from the satellite instead of having to go through the vsphere console and manually updating everything.