Re: Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network

[wbmccarty]

Hi Jamie,

Sorry, I'm not quite being clear. We're not playing loose with RHEL
licenses <g>. In fact, I've not yet cut over to RHEL--I'm waiting for
RHEL 4. But, when I do, we'll purchase enough entitlements to cover our
systems, and several additional entitlements to spare.

Thing is, several times a year we redesign and redeploy a substantial
portion of our lab from scratch, a process that I plan to automate via
cfengine. If I re-install, say, one third of my hosts from bare metal,
I have to spend time on the hosts and the RHN web site configuring RHN,
or have a like number of spare entitlements that I can use immediately
without fuss or bother.

Things'd go more smoothly if I could simply recover and re-use an RHN
configuration whenever the associated physical host is rebuilt from
bare metal. I haven't carefully read the RHEL/RHN service agreement,
but don't feel like what I plan is unreaonable: At all times, we'll
have a significantly greater than one-to-one ratio of entitlements to
active hosts, though probably not the 1.3-15x ratio needed to
facilitate reployments.

Cheers,