SMT connection problem with authenticated proxy configured in global settings

This document (7009619) is provided subject to the disclaimer at the end of this document.

Environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11
Subscription Management Tool (SMT) for SUSE Linux Enterprise 11
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 3
Subscription Management Tool (SMT) for SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP3

Situation

An SMT server is configured to use a proxy with user authentication. The proxy is only configured in the global settings (via 'yast2 proxy'), but not in /etc/smt.conf. When performing smt-ncc-sync/smt-mirror or any other smt-command, SMT connects to the proxy, but the authentication against the proxy does not work.

With SLES11SP3 and SMT11SP3 the following error might be encountered:

Downloading Product information
Failed to POST 'https://secure-www.novell.com/center/regsvc/?command=regdata&lang=en-US&version=1.0': 500 CURL ERROR(56) Failure when receiving data from the peer
Error while fetching Products data.
Downloading Target information
Failed to POST 'https://secure-www.novell.com/center/regsvc/?command=regdata&lang=en-US&version=1.0': 500 CURL ERROR(56) Failure when receiving data from the peer
Error while fetching Targets data.
Downloading repository information
Failed to POST 'https://secure-www.novell.com/center/regsvc/?command=regdata&lang=en-US&version=1.0': 500 CURL ERROR(56) Failure when receiving data from the peer
Error while fetching repository data.
Downloading Product/Repository relations
Failed to POST 'https://secure-www.novell.com/center/regsvc/?command=regdata&lang=en-US&version=1.0': 500 CURL ERROR(56) Failure when receiving data from the peer
Error while fetching ProductCatalogs data.
Downloading Subscription information
Invalid response:500 CURL ERROR(56) Failure when receiving data from the peer
List subscriptions request failed.
Error while fetching Subscription data.
Downloading Registration information
Invalid response:500 CURL ERROR(56) Failure when receiving data from the peer
List registrations request failed.
Error while fetching Registration data.
Flagged repositories which can be mirrored

Resolution

Either add the proxy configuration to smt.conf, too. An other alternative would be to copy the file /root/.curlrc to the home directory of the smt user by using the following command:

cp /root/.curlrc /var/lib/smt/
chown smt:www /var/lib/smt/.curlrc

Disclaimer

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