Red Hat NETWORK 2.6, User Reference Manual

Page: 77 / 104

Chapter 5.
Red Hat Network Daemon
The Red Hat Network Daemon (
rhnsd
) periodically connects to Red Hat Network to check for up-
dates and notifications. The daemon, which runs in the background, is typically started from the ini-
tialization scripts in
/etc/init.d/rhnsd
or
/etc/rc.d/init.d/rhnsd
.
To check for updates,
rhnsd
runs an external program called
rhn_check
located in
/usr/sbin/
.
This is a small application that actually makes the network connection to RHN. The Red Hat Network
Daemon does not listen on any network ports or talk to the network directly. All network activity is
done via the
rhn_check
utility.
5.1. Configuring
The Red Hat Network Daemon can be configured by editing the
/etc/sysconfig/rhn/rhnsd
configuration file. This is actually the configuration file the
rhnsd
initialization script uses. The most
important setting offered by the daemon is its check-in frequency. The default interval time is two
hours (120 minutes). If you modify the configuration file, you must (as root) restart the daemon with
the command
service rhnsd restart
or
/etc/rc.d/init.d/rhnsd restart
.
Important
The minimum time interval allowed is one hour (60 minutes). If you set the interval below one hour, it
will default to two hours (120 minutes).
5.2. Viewing Status
You can view the status of the
rhnsd
by typing the command
service rhnsd status
or
/etc/rc.d/init.d/rhnsd status
at a shell prompt.
5.3. Disabling
To disable the daemon, (as root) run the ntsysv utility and uncheck rhnsd . You can also (as root)
execute the command
chkconfig rhnsd off
. Using these two methods will only disable the ser-
vice the next time the system is started. To stop the service immediately, use the command
service
rhnsd stop
or
/etc/rc.d/init.d/rhnsd stop
.
5.4. Troubleshooting
If you are seeing messages indicating checkins are not taking place, the RHN client on your system is
not successfully reaching Red Hat Network. Make certain:
•
your client is configured correctly.
•
your system can communicate with RHN via SSL (port 443). You may test this by running the
following command from a shell prompt:
telnet xmlrpc.rhn.redhat.com 443