rhnsatellite

This is a very simple provider and type that allow you control what channels a RHEL machine is subscribed to; these channels can be provided by your local Satellite server, or from RHN.

Precursors

Your machine already needs to be registered with RHN or with Satellite. At the site where a version of this code is used, machines are registered on provisioning.

How it works

The provider makes use of the undocumented Red Hat up2date API for controlling the channel subscriptions of an individual machine. For some reason, this API is used by the spacewalk-channel command, but is not exposed in the API documentation. I figured out how to use the API by reading the source for spacewalk-channel; it's all Python, after all.

The module requires an org admin username and password. It needs this so it can change the subscriptions on machines inside your Satellite org. They are specified in the rhnsatellite class parameters and reused in rhnsatellite::channel.

I did it like this so you could use the rhnsatellite::channel type very similarly to the yumrepo type; otherwise you'd have had to specify the admin username and password all over your manifests.

Example

Simply include the module into your manifest:

class {'rhnsatellite':
  server_url => 'https://your.server.here/XMLRPC',
  username   => 'bob',
  password   => 'bob'
}

Now you can subscribe to channels anywhere in that machine's manifest by doing:

rhnsatellite::channel { 'rhel-x86_64-server-optional-7':
  ensure => present,
}