[rhn-users] What's the relationship between yum and rhnplugin?

[Clifford Perry]

Bo Xie wrote:
> I know RHEL 5 uses yum+rhnplugin to access RHEL 5 RHN (satellite) server.
>
> My question are:
> (1) Can I use yum+rhnplugin to access RHEL 3/4 RHN? 
Kinda - yes.. I did this once the other day when I set the 
versionOverride value within /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date to '4AS' as was 
able to list packages from the RHEL 4 AS channels using my RHEL 5 box. 
This though is not shipped, supported nor tested within normal QA cycles 
for the RHEL 3/4 products.
> Is there any
> difference between "RHEL 3/4 RHN (satellite) server" and "RHEL 5 RHN
> (satellite) server"?
Yes and no. The RHN yum plugin is to allow yum to authenticate to RHN 
first. But changes were made on RHN to provide basic support for yum 
byte range support for packages and also the creation of the meta data 
files yum requests. This is one of the reasons why the previous 
Satellites, prior to RHN 4.2 Satellite do not work with RHEL 5. There is 
also a lot of new API calls made by the RHEL 5 rhn_register program 
which would cause older Satellites to error due to not knowing how to 
handle the new API call being requested off it by the rhn_register client.
> (2) I assume 'RHEL 5 RHN (satellite) server' is still a 'RHN
> (satellite) server', not a normal
> 'yum repository' created by 'yum-arch' or 'createrepo'. I mean Red Hat
> only changes the update *client* from up2date to yum, but does not
> change the repository from 'RHN (satellite) server' to 'yum 
> repository'.Am I
> right?
I have kinda answered this already. The Satellite, is still a Satellite, 
and not a yum repo, but it does mimic some aspects of a yum repo by the 
generation of yum repo specific cache files within /var/cache/rhn/.

Regards,
Clifford.
>
> Best Regards,
> Xie, Bo
>
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-- 
Clifford Perry
Team Lead, Satellite Sustaining Engineering
Red Hat, Inc. 
http://www.redhat.com/
+1 919 754 4403
RHCE# 803004507210710