RHSM Subscription Issues Troubleshooting Do's and Don'ts

Environment

• Red Hat Subscription Management (RHSM)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Red Hat Satellite

Issue

• Registered system via Red Hat Subscription Manager subscription-manager, why is it not subscribed?
• How to troubleshoot Red Hat Subscription Management (RHSM) subscription issues?

Resolution

Do's

Steps to take for "why is my system not subscribed" or similar types of issues:

(a) subscription-manager refresh
(b) subscription-manager attach --auto
-or-
subscription-manager attach --pool=POOLID

(a) is only really required if the customer is changing something locally, like manually removing a product cert in
/etc/pki/product - it will push the latest client data up to the server and fetch the latest entitlement certs if something was added server-side in Customer Portal or Satellite 6.

(b) is really the critical thing here, and it should never require a re-register to work.

Don'ts

(1) subscription-manager unsubscribe --all
(2) subscription-manager unregister
(3) subscription-manager clean
(4) subscription-manager register --auto-attach

(1) and (3) are unnecessary given (2), but most importantly (2) itself will wipe out an entire system profile, which could contain other entitlements the customer manually set up, yum repo overrides that were carefully added, SLA / autoheal settings for the system, system annotations (future feature), and in the case of Satellite a whole lot more. All of this is gone when you run step (2).

In most known situations, none of this should ever be required. There might be instances where it looks like it helps, but only because (4) involves auto-attach - the only required step.

More background

A customer can list the available subscription pools with "subscription-manager list --available". Can also list what's currently consumed with "subscription-manager list --consumed".

If a system status is Invalid, it's because it has an installed product ID that is not yet currently covered by a subscription.

If a system status is Partial, it's because not all of it's sockets/cores are covered by subscriptions, and additional entitlements are required. Note that systems can still get updates/rpms when in Partial status.

By default, all systems have an autoheal setting enabled, which means that once every 24 hours (by default) they will essentially run an auto-attach. Thus is a system has existed for more than a day and has a subscription issue, it's likely there are no subscriptions available in the account to correct the problem, or manual intervention is required (such as a SLA mismatch).

So the key to any subscription problem is:

• • What products are on the system and what is their status: subscription-manager list --installed
• • What pools are available: subscription-manager list --available

And the solution, assuming subscriptions are available on the account, which match the systems SLA, is to use subscription-manager refresh, and subscription-manager attach.

More information on Red Hat Subscription Management concepts and workflows is available in the product documentation This content is not included.here.

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