Installation guide

Chapter 4.
Installation
This chapter describes the initial installation of the RHN Proxy Server. It presumes the pre-
requisites listed in Chapter 2 Requirements have been met. However, if you are upgrading
to a newer version of RHN Proxy Server, contact your Red Hat representative for assis-
tance.
4.1. Base Install
The RHN Proxy Server is designed to run on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS operating
system. Therefore, the first phase is to install the base operating system, either from disc,
ISO image, or kickstart. During and after operating system installation, make sure you:
• Allocate plenty of space to the partition that will be used to store packages, according
to the hardware requirements set forth earlier. The default location for cached Red
Hat packages is /var/spool/squid, while custom packages are located in
/var/spool/rhn-proxy.
• Install the packages required by RHN Proxy Server and only those packages.
Note
You must install only the base packages, as others will cause the RHN Proxy Server
installation to fail.
Refer to Section 2.1 Software Requirements for the method to obtain the correct package
group needed for each version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS.
Important
If you plan to obtain Monitoring-level service, you must install your RHN Proxy Server
on Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 3 Update 5 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 4. These
are the only supported base operating systems for Proxies serving Monitoring-entitled
systems.
• Enable Network Time Protocol (NTP) on the Proxy and select the appropriate time zone.
All client systems should already be running the ntpd daemon and be set to the correct
time zone.
• Disable the ipchains and iptables services after installation.