Subscription Management Tool (SMT) for SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 SP5 allows enterprise customers to optimize the management of SUSE Linux Enterprise software updates and subscription entitlements. It establishes a proxy system for SUSE® Customer Center with repository (formerly known as catalog) and registration targets. This helps you centrally manage software updates within the firewall on a per-system basis, while maintaining your corporate security policies and regulatory compliance.
SMT allows you to provision updates for all of your devices running a product based on SUSE Linux Enterprise. By downloading these updates once and distributing them throughout the enterprise, you can set more restrictive firewall policies. This also reduces bandwidth usage, as there is no need to download the same updates for each device. SMT is fully supported and available as a download for customers with an active SUSE Linux Enterprise product subscription.
Subscription Management Tool provides functionality that can be useful in many situations, including the following:
You want to update both SUSE Linux Enterprise and RedHat Enterprise Linux servers.
You want to get a detailed overview of your company's license compliance.
Not all machines in your environment can be connected to SUSE Customer Center to register and retrieve updates for bandwidth or security reasons.
There are SUSE Linux Enterprise hosts that are restricted and difficult to update without putting in place a custom update management solution.
You need to integrate additional software update external or internal repositories into your update solution.
You are looking for a turnkey box staging solution for testing updates before releasing them to the clients.
You want to have a quick overview of the patch status of your SUSE Linux Enterprise servers and desktops.
The Subscription Management Tool Guide is divided into the following chapters:
Introduction to the SMT installation process and the SMT Configuration Wizard. You will learn how to install the SMT add-on on your base system during the installation process or on an already installed base system.
Description of the YaST configuration module SMT Server. This chapter explains how to set and configure organization credentials, SMT database passwords, and e-mail addresses to send SMT reports, or set the SMT job schedule, and activate or deactivate the SMT service.
Explanation of how to mirror the installation and update sources with YaST.
Description of how to register client machines on SUSE Customer Center. The client machines must be configured to use SMT.
In-depth look at generated reports based on SMT data. Generated reports contain statistics of all registered machines and products used and of all active, expiring, or missing subscriptions.
Description of the most important scripts, configuration files and certificates supplied with SMT.
Introduction to configuring any client machine to register against SMT and download software updates from there instead of communicating directly with the SUSE Customer Center.
Chapters in this manual contain links to additional documentation resources that are available either on the system or on the Internet.
For an overview of the documentation available for your product and the latest documentation updates, see https://documentation.suse.com/.
Your feedback and contribution to this documentation is welcome! Several channels are available:
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