Working with Subscription yum Repos

As "Subscription and Content Architecture" says, CentOS Subscription Manager works with package management tools like yum. Subscription Manager has its own yum plug-ins: product-id for subscription-related information for products and subscription-manager which is used for the content repositories.

As systems are subscribed to products, the associated content repositories (identified in the entitlement certificate) are made available to the system. The content repositories are based on the product and on the content delivery network, defined in the baseurl parameter of the rhsm.conf file.

A subscription may include access to optional content channels along with the default channels. This optional channels must be enabled before the packages in them can be installed (even if the system is fully entitled to the products in those channels).

[root@server ~]# yum repolist all
repo id                      repo name                           status
rhel-5-server                Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5Server -  enabled:    1,749
rhel-5-server-beta           Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5Server Be enabled:      869
rhel-5-server-optional-rpms  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5Server Op disabled
rhel-5-server-supplementary  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5Server Su disabled

The optional and supplementary channels are named rhel-5-server-optional-rpms and rhel-5-server-supplementary, respectively.

• The repositories can be enabled using the yum-config-manager command:

  [root@server ~]# yum-config-manager --enable rhel-5-server-optional-rpms

  Alternatively, simply specify the optional or supplementary repository when installing a package with yum. This uses the --enablerepo repo_name option. For example:

  # yum install rubygems --enablerepo=rhel-5-server-optional-rpms
  Loaded plugins: product-id, refresh-packagekit, subscription-manager
  Updating CentOS repositories.
  ....

  Using yum is described in YUM (Yellowdog Updater Modified).