3.1 Prerequisites for Creating Subscriptions

You must first create the credentials before you can use them to create subscriptions. Credentials are used to authenticate to the repositories.

For more information on how to create credentials, see Using the Credential Vaultin the ZENworks 11 SP2 ZENworks Control Center Reference.

The following table describes how to obtain the username, password, and other prerequisites for each subscription:

Subscription Types

Prerequisites

Novell Subscription, RCE Subscription

You can obtain the username and password to use as credentials either by directly contacting Novell Customer Center or by obtaining the values of the deviceid and secret files from a device that is already registered to Novell Customer Center.

For more information on how to register with Novell Customer Center, see the Novell Customer Center documentation.

On SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 and OES2 devices, you can obtain the values of the deviceid and secret files from the /etc/zmd/deviceid and the /etc/zmd/secret locations in order to authenticate to the NU or RCE repositories.

On SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 devices, you can obtain the username and the password values from the /etc/zypp/credentials.d/NCCcredentials file.

ZLM Subscription

You must obtain the IP address or the DNS name of the ZENworks Linux Management Server from which you want to replicate content. You must also obtain the deviceid and secret values of a device that is registered to the ZENworks Linux Management Server. By using these as credentials, you can replicate only the content that the device is entitled to.

On SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 devices or SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 devices, you can obtain the value of deviceid and secret from the /etc/zmd/deviceid and /etc/zmd/secret files respectively, or from the /etc/opt/novell/zenworks/zmd/deviceid and /etc/opt/novell/zenworks/zmd/secret files on any other registered devices.

YUM (RPM-MD)

Obtain the URL of an available YUM (RPM-MD) repository. If the repository is authenticated, you must obtain the username and password to access the repository URL.

RHN Subscription

  1. From an RHEL device, obtain the systemid file that is located in /etc/sysconfig/rhn/.

  2. Use the systemid file as a credential to authenticate to the RHN repository.