Installation guide

6 Chapter 2. Requirements

• Conﬁguration of the system to accept remote commands and conﬁguration management through

Red Hat Network. Refer to Section 4.2 RHN Proxy Server Installation Process for instructions.

2.2. Hardware Requirements

The following hardware conﬁguration is required for the RHN Proxy Server:

• Pentium III processor, 1.26GHz, 512K cache or equivalent

• 512 MB of memory

• 3 GB storage for base install of Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS

• 6 GB storage per distribution/channel

The load on the Apache HTTP Server is directly related to the frequency with which client systems

connect to the Proxy, so if you reduce the default interval of four hours (or 240 minutes) as set in the

/etc/sysconfig/rhn/rhnsd conﬁguration ﬁle of the client systems, you will increase the load on

this component signiﬁcantly.

2.3. Disk Space Requirements

The caching mechanism used by RHN Proxy Server is the Squid HTTP proxy, which saves signif-

icant bandwidth for the clients. It should have a reasonable amount of space available. The cached

packages are stored in /var/spool/squid. The required free space allotment is 6 GB storage per

distribution/channel.

If the RHN Proxy Server is conﬁgured to distribute custom, or local packages, make sure that the

/var mount point on the system storing local packages has sufﬁcient disk space to hold all of the

custom packages, which are stored in /var/spool/rhn-proxy. The required disk space for local

packages depends on the number of custom packages served.

2.4. Additional Requirements

The following additional requirements must be met before the RHN Proxy Server installation can be

considered complete:

• Full Access

Client systems need full network access to the RHN Proxy Server services and ports.

• Firewall Rules

The RHN Proxy Server solution can be ﬁrewalled from the Internet, but it must be able to issue

outbound connections to the Internet on ports 80 and 443. In addition, if the Proxy will be connected

to an RHN Satellite Server that will be conﬁgured to push actions to client systems and the Proxy,

you must allow inbound connections on port 5222.

• Synchronized System Times

There is great time sensitivity when connecting to a Web server running SSL (Secure Sockets

Layer); it is imperative the time settings on the clients and server are reasonably close together so

the SSL certiﬁcate does not expire before or during use. It is recommended Network Time Protocol

(NTP) be used to synchronize the clocks.

• Fully Qualiﬁed Domain Name (FQDN)

The system upon which the RHN Proxy Server will be installed must resolve its own FQDN prop-

erly.