Prerequisites; Preparing For Import - Red Hat NETWORK SATELLITE SERVER 3.7 Installation Manual

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Important
To populate custom channels correctly, you must first populate at least one Red Hat base channel.
The RHN Satellite Synchronization Tool creates the necessary directory structures and permis-
sions; without these, the custom channel tools will not work properly. For this reason, you should use
these instructions to set up your base channel(s) and then refer to the RHN Channel Management
Guide for steps to establish custom channels.

6.2.1. Prerequisites

To perform the RHN Satellite Server import, the following prerequisites must be met:
The RHN Satellite Server installation must have been performed successfully.
•
The Red Hat Network Channel Content ISOs must be available, or the Satellite must have access
•
to the Internet and the RHN website.

6.2.2. Preparing for Import

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.
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 and
then the name of the channel for your version of RHN Satellite Server. 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 don't 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 3 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. Repeat. 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
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
cp -ruv /mnt/import/* /var/rhn-sat-import/
7. Then unmount
umount /mnt/import/
8. Repeat these steps for each Channel Content ISO of every channel to be imported.
to store the file(s) with the command:
/mnt
) into
/var/rhn-sat-import/
in preparation for the next CD or ISO:
/mnt/import
Chapter 6. Importing and Synchronizing
: