Red Hat NETWORK SATELLITE 5.2 - CHANNEL MANAGEMENT, Installation Manual

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Chapter 6. Importing and Synchronizing
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Although it is possible to conduct the import directly from the RHN website, this should be done only if
Channel Content ISOs are not available. It takes a long time to populate a channel from scratch over
the Internet. For this reason, Red Hat urges you to use ISOs, if they are available, for initial import.
6.2.2.1. Preparing Channel Content ISOs
Channel Content ISOs are special collections that contain both packages and XML dumps of
metadata. The ISO images can be downloaded from the RHN website on a machine connected to
the Internet and then transferred to the Satellite. After logging in, click
Channels
in the top navigation
bar. Then, click on the RHN Satellite Server channel, making sure to select the Satellite channel that
corresponds to your version of Satellite. Click the
Downloads
tab and use the instructions on the page
to obtain the Channel Content ISOs, available by version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. If the desired
Channel Content ISOs do not appear, ensure your RHN Entitlement Certificate has been uploaded to
RHN and correctly identifies the target channels.
Channel Content ISOs are mounted and then copied to a temporary repository directory. Before
mounting the ISOs, ensure the temporary repository has enough disk space to copy all the contents
into a single directory. For a single channel, the approximate required space is 3 GB. The process to
copy Channel Content ISOs is to mount each one, copy its contents to the temporary repository, and
then unmount the ISO. Each channel consists of several ISOs. Once finished, the administrator should
delete the temporary directory and all of its contents. Follow these steps:
1. Log into the machine as root.
2. Insert the first Channel Content ISO that has been burned to disc.
3. Create a directory in
/mnt/
to store the file(s) with the command:
mkdir /mnt/import/
4. Mount the ISO file from within the directory containing it using the command:
mount iso_filename /mnt/import -o loop
5. Create a target directory for the files, such as:
mkdir /var/rhn-sat-import/
6. This sample command assumes the administrator wants to copy the contents of the ISO (mounted
in
/mnt/import/
) into
/var/rhn-sat-import/
:
cp -ruv /mnt/import/* /var/rhn-sat-import/
7. Then unmount
/mnt/import
in preparation for the next CD or ISO:
umount /mnt/import
8. Repeat these steps for each Channel Content ISO of every channel to be imported.