Healing Subscriptions

Subscription Manager can monitor all of the active entitlements for a system. Along with passively warning that a subscription is close to expiration ("Responding to Subscription Notifications"), Subscription Manager can be configured to re-subscribe to subscriptions, automatically and actively, as one nears its expiry. This is system healing.

System healing prevents a system from having unentitled products as long as any valid subscription is available for it.

System healing is configured as part of the Subscription Manager daemon, rhsmcertd. This daemon checks the certificate validity dates daily. If a subscription is within 24 hours of expiring, then Subscription Manager will check for any available compatible subscriptions and automatically re-subscribes the system, much like auto-subscribing during registration.

Enabling Healing

System healing is disabled by default. It can be enabled by manually adding the autoheal parameter to the Subscription Manager configuration.

Open the Subscription Manager configuration file.

vim /etc/rhsm/rhsm.conf

In the [rhsmcertd] area, add the autoheal line, and set the value to true.

[rhsmcertd]
certFrequency = 240
healFrequency = 1440
autoheal = true

The configuration can also be updated using the config command:

[root@server1 ~]# subscription-manager config --rhsmcertd.autoheal=true

Changing the Healing Check Frequency

Healing cannot be disabled by changing the time interval. Setting the healFrequency parameter to zero means that Subscription Manager simply uses the default time setting.

Open the Subscription Manager configuration file:

# vim /etc/rhsm/rhsm.conf

In the [rhsmcertd] section, set the healFrequency parameter to the time, in minutes, to check for changed subscriptions.
```
[rhsmcertd]
certFrequency = 240
healFrequency = 1440
```
Restart the rhsmcertd daemon to reload the configuration.
```
# service rhsmcertd start
```