RHEL Satellite 6 Installation & Configuration HOW-TO Part 1

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In the following Blog posts I will post tutorials on how to install and configure RHEL Satellite with all the bells and whistles possible. It will include detailed instructions on setting up each component and how to proceed from there.

This post assumes a fully functional Red Hat Identity Management stack is present in the current network. The RHEL iDM solution will be used for all linux clients deployed with Satellite. This includes DNS, NTP, users, groups, RBAC and HBAC capabilities. RHEL Satellite will manage pxeboot, dhcp, tftp making this a complete environment for a Linux client domain.

This first post will be about the machine itself, how to set it up and what to do before starting this Tutorial.

First up, the machine hardware:

Minimum requirements:

  • 2 CPU
  • 12 Gigabyte RAM
  • 4 Gigabyte SWAP
  • 64 bit CPU architecture.

Recommended requirements:

  • 4 CPU
  • 16+ Gigabyte RAM
  • 8+ Gigabyte SWAP
  • 64 bit CPU architecture.

Machine software requirements:

  • RHEL 6.8+ or RHEL 7.1+
  • Hostname is set to a unique Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN).
  • The Operating System is a MINIMAL install.
  • Let me stress that again ; OS = MINIMAL.

If your satellite install fails for any reason, please re-read the requirements above.

After the host is setup, the first things to do in order are:

  • Edit /etc/hosts to make sure the hostname is set correctly.

 

127.0.0.1   localhost.localdomain localhost4 localhost4.localdomain4 localhost
::1         localhost.localdomain localhost6 localhost6.localdomain6 localhost

10.0.0.1    satellite.oliekoets.nl satellite

Edit /etc/hostname (rhel 6) or use hostnamectl (rhel 7) to set hostname to FQDN.

  • Update to the latest packages (yum update -y)
  • Install the ipa-client
  • Register the RHEL server with Identity Management.
  • Subscribe the host with Red Hat Subscription Management.
    • The subscription should include base-rhel and the rhel-satellite subscription.
  • disable all repositories, delete /etc/yum.repos.d/*
  • Enable only the RHEL-Server , RHEL-Satellite and RHEL-Software-Collections repositories.

This concludes the prerequisites of the host. Next blog post we will start with the actual installation.