rhsmcertd(8) - Linux man page

Name

rhsmcertd - Periodically scans and updates the entitlement certificates on a registered system.

Synopsis

rhsmcertd start|stop|status|restart

Description

Red Hat provides content updates and support by issuing subscriptions for its products. These subscriptions are allocated to systems (machines). Red Hat Subscription Manager is a tool which allows administrators to manage those subscriptions by registering systems and people, assigning subscriptions, and viewing subscriptions.

When subscriptions are allocated to a system or when new subscriptions are available, the subscription management system issues that machine an X.509 certificate which contains all of the details of that subscription. The rhsmcertd process runs periodically to check for changes in the subscriptions available to a machine by updating the entitlement certificates installed on the machine and by installing new entitlement certificates as they're available.

The entitlements system also issues the system X.509 certificates that grant that system access to the appropriate content repositories for the system to be able to access its subscribed product downloads and updates.

rhsmcertd is started with the machine, by default, and is always running in the background. At the interval set in the rhsm.conf file, the process checks with the Red Hat Entitlement System to see if any new subscriptions are available to the system and pulls down any new certificates. The frequency is configured in minutes in the [rhsmcertd] section of the Red Hat Subscription Manager's configuration file. 

[rhsmcertd]
certFrequency= 240

This process invokes the certmgr.py script to perform the certificate add and update operations.

Usage

rhsmcertd restart

Associated Files

* /usr/share/rhsm/certmgr.py
* /etc/rhsm/rhsm.conf

Bugs

This process is part of the subscription management system at Red Hat. To file bugs against this process, go to https://bugzilla.redhat.com/ and select Red Hat > Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 > subscription-manager.

Authors

Deon Lackey, <dlackey@redhat.com>, and Jeff Ortel, <jortel@redhat.com>. rhsmcertd was written by Jeff Ortel.

Copyright

Copyright © 2010 Red Hat, Inc. This is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPLv2). A copy of this license is available at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.txt.

Referenced By

rhsmcertd_selinux(8)