Novell Subscription Management Tool
Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 Service Pack 2

When Subscription Management Tool (SMT) is installed on a SUSE Linux Enterprise server, it registers itself with the update service at https://nu.novell.com and subscribes to the appropriate update repositories (catalogs) provided at that location. For the time being the catalogs needed are SLES10-SP2-Updates andSLE10-SP2-SMT-Updates.
Since the SMT utilities looks at the url parameter in /etc/suseRegister.conf when synchronizing available catalogs, updates and registrations, this parameter must remain unchanged and thus the SMT server stays registered with with nu.novell.com.
Unfortunately this leads to the inefficient behavior that the SMT server will download the patches needed during update of itself - even though they may already be present in mirrored catalogs on the server itself.

It is possible to work around this situation by doing the following :

1. Make sure the SLES10-SP2-Updates andSLE10-SP2-SMT-Updates catalogs are mirrored for the architecture of the server.
2. Delete the https://nu.novell.com service with the command

   rug service-delete https://nu.novell.com

   This also deletes the catalogs.
3. Add the SLES10-SP2-Updates and SLE10-SP2-SMT-Updates repositories on the server itself as YUM services :

   rug service-add -t yum http://<url-of-your-smt-server>/repo/\$RCE/SLES10-SP2-Updates/<target>/ SLES10-SP2-Updates

   e.g.

   rug service-add -t yum http://my-smt.mycompany.com/repo/\$RCE/SLES10-SP2-Updates/sles-10-x86_64/ SLES10-SP2-Updates

   and

   rug service-add -t yum http://<url-of-your-smt-server>/repo/\$RCE/SLE10-SP2-SMT-Updates/<target>/ SLE10-SP2-SMT-Updates

   e.g.

   rug service-add -t yum http://my-smt.mycompany.com/repo/\$RCE/SLE10-SP2-SMT-Updates/sles-10-x86_64/ SLE10-SP2-SMT-Updates

4. Verify that the services both show up with
   

   rug service-list
   

5. Subscribe to the SLES10-SP2-Updates and SLE10-SP2-SMT-Updates catalogs :

   rug subscribe SLES10-SP2-Updates
   rug subscribe SLE10-SP2-SMT-Updates

There is one very important caveat about this. If you execute theNovell Customer Center module in YaST, it will re-register the https://nu.novell.com service and then start pulling updates for itself from nu.novell.com again. This is because the YaST module invokes /usr/bin/suse_register with the --restore-repos parameter, which makes it restore all repositories - also the ones that have been deleted once by the user/administrator.
So if there is a need to register the SMT server against nu.novell.com again after implementing this workaround, then do it via the command-line utility /usr/bin/suse_register like this :

suse_register -a regcode-sles=YourActivationCode -a email=YourEmailAddress