SUSE Manager 4.X Adds System Details to SUSE Customer Center

From the start, SUSE Manager has been delivering features not just at the time of each release, but also in maintenance updates that are much simpler to apply. This gives SUSE the ability to deliver new capabilities faster and allows us to be responsive to changes in need.

SUSE Manager 4.2 recently added the ability to forward registered client systems details to the SUSE Customer Center (SCC) in update 4.2.4. With the 4.1.13 update – delivered 28 January 2022 – this same functionality has now been provided in SUSE Manager 4.1.

SUSE Manager’s relationship with SCC has historically been one way – simply querying it to determine entitlements. Before this feature, SUSE Manager server and SUSE Manager Proxy instances were listed in SCC but not the managed clients. This was confusing for customers, since other update mechanisms like direct connect, RMT (Repository Mirroring Tool) or SMT (Subscription Management Tool) showed the details of the registered client systems. Now the inclusion of this capability in SUSE Manager 4.X provides a uniform view. You can have full SCC visibility of the client systems registered via SUSE Manager. Look for more features to enhance released versions of SUSE Manager in future maintenance releases.

How do you apply a maintenance update? For SUSE Manager Server (both 4.1 and 4.2):

1 – Refresh the repositories, and list available patches:

zypper ref && zypper lp

2 – Stop the SUSE Manager services to avoid conflict with running processes:

spacewalk-service stop

3 – Perform the update – and this command may need to be repeated until all patches are applied:

zypper patch

4 – Reboot the SUSE Manager server to ensure all processes are using the newly installed updates.

shutdown –r now

Any changes to the SUSE Manager schema are automatically incorporated into the startup sequence. And now you are on the latest version!

SUSE Manager has a new scheduled task scheduled to run by default every 15 minutes called ‘mgr-forward-registration-default’. It communicates with SCC about registered clients, updating the account SUMA has in its ‘Organization Credentials.’

For full details on this and other SUSE Manager 4.X capabilities, please review the release notes and documentation available here:

https://documentation.suse.com/#suma