"OK, last week we took a quick look at Red Hat's new business initiative, the Red Hat
Network (RHN). This week we're going to get jiggy with some of the system
administration issues that the RHN forces us to consider when dealing with it."
"The first thing that you will need to know is that currently only Red Hat Linux 7 is supported by
the RHN, although soon 6.2 will also be supported. So if your company is running an old 5.2 box,
as well you might be, for 5.2 was quite a reliable release, then forget about the RHN. It's not
supported. I very much doubt that many people are running version 7 of Red Hat Linux on trusted
servers yet anyhow, so this is more of an option you might want to look at when you start
installing new Red Hat servers."
"Secondly, using the RHN will involve a little daemon running on supported machines. This daemon
is called the 'rhnsd' or Red Hat Network Service Daemon, and it's run via the normal init scripts. A
simple way to turn this on and off is to use the utility 'ntsysv' which is packaged with Red Hat.
Saves you all the hassle of modifying those scripts yourself. On the systems I was looking at, this
daemon did not seem to take up much system resources at all. If you're worried, try running 'top'."
