Automating Synchronization - Red Hat NETWORK SATELLITE 5.2 Installation Manual

Chapter 8. Maintenance
Figure 8.3. User Delete Confirmation
Many other options exist for managing users. You can find instructions for them in the RHN website
chapter of the RHN Reference Guide.

8.8. Automating Synchronization

Manually synchronizing the RHN Satellite Server repository with Red Hat Network can be a time-
intensive task. United States business hours tend to be the peak usage time for Red Hat Network, so
synchronization at that time may be slow. For these reasons, Red Hat encourages you to automate
synchronization at other times to better balance load and ensure quick synchronization. Continental
United States business hours are roughly 8:00 AM to 9:00 PM EST (UTC -5), due to four time zones,
Monday through Friday. These hours may vary seasonally by one hour. Further, Red Hat strongly
recommends that synchronization occur randomly for best performance.
This automation can be set easily by the addition of a simple cron job. To do this, edit the crontab as
root:
crontab -e
This opens the crontab in a text editor, by default Vi. Another editor can be used by first changing the
EDITOR variable, like so: export EDITOR=gedit.
Once opened, use the first five fields (minute, hour, day, month, and weekday) to schedule
the synchronization. Remember, hours use military time. Edit the crontab to include random
synchronization, like so:
0 1 * * * perl -le 'sleep rand 9000' && satellite-sync --email >/dev/null
\
2>/dev/null
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