Red Hat NETWORK SATELLITE 5.3.0 Installation Manual page 46

Chapter 6. Importing and Synchronizing
• The RHN Satellite installation must have been performed successfully.
• The Red Hat Network Channel Content ISOs or RHN Satellite Exporter data must be available, or
the Satellite must have access to the Internet and the RHN website.
Although it is possible to conduct the import directly from the RHN website, this should be done only if
Channel Content ISOs are not available. It takes a long time to populate a channel from scratch over
the Internet. For this reason, Red Hat urges you to use ISOs, if they are available, for initial import.
6.2.2.1. Preparing Channel Content ISOs
Channel Content ISOs are special collections that contain both packages and XML dumps of
metadata. The ISO images can be downloaded from the RHN website on a machine connected to the
Internet and then transferred to the Satellite. After logging in, click Channels in the top navigation bar.
Then, click on the RHN Satellite channel, making sure to select the Satellite channel that corresponds
to your version of Satellite. Click the Downloads tab and use the instructions on the page to obtain
the Channel Content ISOs, available by version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. If the desired Channel
Content ISOs do not appear, ensure your RHN Entitlement Certificate has been uploaded to RHN and
correctly identifies the target channels.
Channel Content ISOs are mounted and then copied to a temporary repository directory. Before
mounting the ISOs, ensure the temporary repository has enough disk space to copy all the contents
into a single directory. For a single channel, the approximate required space is at least 20 GB. The
process to copy Channel Content ISOs is to mount each one, copy its contents to the temporary
repository, and then unmount the ISO. Each channel consists of several ISOs. Once finished, the
administrator should delete the temporary directory and all of its contents. Follow these steps:
1. Log into the machine as root.
2. Insert the first Channel Content ISO that has been burned to disc.
3. Create a directory in /mnt/ to store the file(s) with the command:
mkdir /mnt/import/
4. Mount the ISO file from within the directory containing it using the command:
mount iso_filename /mnt/import -o loop
5. Create a target directory for the files, such as:
mkdir /var/rhn-sat-import/
6. This sample command assumes the administrator wants to copy the contents of the ISO (mounted
in /mnt/import/) into /var/rhn-sat-import/:
cp -ruv /mnt/import/* /var/rhn-sat-import/
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