Installation guide

Chapter 25. Register Your System and Apply Subscriptions
25.1. Regist ering t he Syst em
Before you can access service and software maintenance information and enhanced support
included as part of your subscription, you must register your new system with Red Hat and associate
or attach the appropriate subscriptions with your system.
A Red Hat subscription supplied your system access to:
Software updates, errata, and maintenance
Red Hat technical support resources and Knowledgebase articles
The Red Hat Subscription Management ⁠Subscription Concepts and Workflows has information on
different environments and workflows. The basic registration process (which is described in this
section) registers a system with Customer Portal Subscription Management (Red Hat's hosted
services) and automatically subscribes the system to the best-matched subscriptions. It is also
possible to register a system with a Subscription Asset Manager subscription service, CloudForms
System Engine, or to register a disconnected system through the Customer Portal.
25.1.1. Regist ering at First boot
The first time you boot a new Red Hat Enterprise Linux system, the f irst bo ot system prompts you to
register the system and auto-attach the matching subscriptions.
Red Hat uses X.509 certificates to identify installed products on a system, the subscriptions attached
to a system, and the system itself within the subscription service inventory. There are several different
subscription services which use and recognize certificate-based subscriptions, and a system can be
registered with any of them in firstboot:
Customer Portal Subscription Management, hosted services from Red Hat (the default)
Subscription Asset Manager, an on-premise subscription server which proxies content delivery
back to the Customer Portal's services
CloudForms System Engine, an on-premise service which handles both subscription services and
content delivery
The specific type of subscription/content service does not need to be selected; all three server types
(Customer Portal Subscription Management, Subscription Asset Manager, and CloudForms System
Engine) are within Red Hat Subscription Management and use the same types of service APIs. The
only thing that needs to be identified is the hostname of the service to connect to and then the
appropriate user credentials for that service.
1. To identify which subscription server to use for registration, enter the hostname of the service.
The default service is Customer Portal Subscription Management, with the hostname
subscription.rhn.redhat.com. To use a different subscription service, such as
Subscription Asset Manager, enter the hostname of the local server.
2. Click Forward.
3. Enter the user credentials f o r t he g iven su bscrip t io n service to log in.
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