5 Registering Clients

For Uyuni 3 and later, you can choose to use either traditional or Salt client management framework, or a mixture of both, depending on your environment and requirements.

Activation keys are used with both traditional and Salt clients to ensure that your clients have the correct software entitlements, are connecting to the appropriate channels, and are subscribed to the relevant groups. Each activation key is bound to an organization, which you can set when you create the key.

This section contains information on how to create activation keys for both traditional and Salt clients, and provides some best practices for working with activation keys.

When you create activation keys, keep these best practices in mind:

In this section you will create a tools repository on the Uyuni Server for providing client tools. The client tools repository contains packages for installing Salt on minions as well as required packages for registering traditional clients during the bootstrapping procedure. These packages will be installed from the newly generated repository during the registration process. In the following procedure you will create the SUSE Linux Enterprise tools repository.

Important: Creating a Tools Repository when an SCC Channel has not been Synced

Before following the procedure to create the tools repository make sure the SUSE vendor channel you will be using with your client has been completely synced. You can check this by running tail -f /var/log/rhn/reposync/<CHANNEL_NAME>.log as root. In the following example replace version with the actual version string:

# tail -f /var/log/rhn/reposync/sles`version`-pool-x86_64.log

Once completed you should see the following output in your terminal:

2017/12/12 15:20:32 +02:00 Importing packages started.
2017/12/12 15:22:02 +02:00 1.07 %
...
2017/12/12 15:34:25 +02:00 86.01 %
2017/12/12 15:35:49 +02:00 Importing packages finished.
2017/12/12 15:35:49 +02:00 Linking packages to channel.
...
2017/12/12 15:35:59 +02:00 Sync completed.

This repository is suitable for both Server and Desktop of SUSE Linux Enterprise.

There are currently three methods for registering Salt minions. This section describes the first method and uses a bootstrap repository. The second method uses bootstrap script, and is described in Section 5.4, “Registering Traditional Clients”. The third method uses the Web UI, and is described in Section 7.6, “Bootstrapping [Salt]”.

You can also use these methods to change existing traditional clients into Salt minions.

The following section assumes you have created a SUSE Manager tools repository. You can review creating a tools repository in Section 5.3, “Creating the Uyuni Tools Repository”.

Warning: Ensure the Salt Master is Reachable During Bootstrap

The Salt master and its proxy should always be reachable via both IP address and the FQDN. In the following rare scenario:

• The Salt master (SUSE Manager) is in some DNS.

• Your Minions are in a different subnet bound to an alternate DNS and the Salt master record is absent.

• The Salt master cannot know that the minion is not utilizing the same DNS record. The the Salt master nevertheless sends the FQDN of itself to the minion expecting it to join.

• The minion looks for a different DNS, one where the master record does not exist therefore bootstrap fails.

Once you have fully synced a base channel from the Web UI for clients to obtain software sources from, for example: SLES12-SP3-Pool_for_x86_64 perform the following procedure to register a Salt minion.

Your newly registered minion should now show up within the Web UI under Salt › Keys. Accept the pending key to begin management.

If you have used your hypervisor clone utility, and attempted to register the cloned Salt client, you might get this error:

We're sorry, but the system could not be found.

This is caused by the new, cloned, system having the same machine ID as an existing, registered, system. You can adjust this manually to correct the error and register the cloned system successfully.