SUSE Registration Fails with Certificate and Permission Errors

Attempts to register or re-register the server with suse_register gets "Permission denied" and SSL certificate errors.

ERROR: Could not add 'https://nu.novell.com': Failed to download XML metadata: Permission to access 'https://nu.novell.com/repo/repoindex.xml' denied.

The subscriptions and registration codes are active. The zypper.log file shows the following error:

[base] Exception.cc(log):94 Error message: SSL: certificate subject name 'a.govid1.com' does not match target host name 'nu.novell.com'

The curl command test in updates.txt generated by supportconfig shows the following:

curl: (51) SSL: certificate subject name 'a.govid1.com' does not match target host name 'nu.novell.com'

The /etc/hosts file contains one or both of the following entries:

xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx    secure-www.novell.com
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx    nu.novell.com

Remove the secure-www.novell.com and/or nu.novell.com entries from the /etc/hosts file and re-register the server. To force re-registering the server, first reset the server.

rczmd stop
rm -r /var/cache/zmd/*
rm /var/lib/zmd/zmd.db
rm /etc/zmd/deviceid
rm /etc/zmd/secret
rm /var/cache/SuseRegister/lastzmdconfig.cache
rm /var/lib/zmd/package-history.db
rczmd start

After reseting the server, register it as documented.