Red Hat NETWORK 4.0 -, Reference Manual

Page: 59 / 290

Chapter 3.
Red Hat Network Daemon
The Red Hat Network Daemon (
rhnsd
) periodically connects to Red Hat Network
to check for updates and notifications. The daemon, which runs in the background,
is typically started from the initialization scripts in
/etc/init.d/rhnsd
or
/etc/rc.d/init.d/rhnsd
.
Tip
Provisioning-entitled systems served by an RHN Satellite Server may have actions imme-
diately initiated or pushed to them. Refer to Section 6.4.2.8.1 System Details
⇒
Details
for instructions on enabling this feature.
To check for updates,
rhnsd
runs an external program called
rhn_check
located in
/usr/sbin/
. This is a small application that 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.
3.1. 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 four hours (240 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 four hours (240 minutes).