Simple Content Access

Note: Currently this feature is only relevant for Red Hat customers who import subscription manifests, but will be available to all Katello users in a future version.

Simple Content Access is a feature to simplify subscription management. When an organization has Simple Content Access enabled, content hosts don’t need to subscribe to a product in order to access product content. Instead, content hosts will automatically see any repositories published into their selected content view and lifecycle environment.

Enabling or disabling Simple Content Access from Katello

To turn Simple Content Access on or off, navigate to either of the following places:

• Administer > Organizations > (your organization) > Details
  • Check or uncheck the Simple Content Access checkbox, then click Submit.
• Content > Subscriptions > Manage Manifest
  • Toggle the Simple Content Access toggle switch.

If the checkbox is not present, or the toggle switch is disabled, it could be for one of the following reasons:

• There is no manifest imported for the organization
• The organization administrator has disabled Simple Content Access for the organization

Note that toggling Simple Content Access will cause a manifest refresh. When the task is complete, you’ll get a notification in the notification drawer.

If Simple Content Access is turned on or off from Katello, changes will be reflected immediately in the Red Hat Customer Portal.

If Simple Content Access is turned on or off from outside Katello (e.g. the Red Hat Customer Portal), the changes will be reflected in Katello upon the next manifest refresh.

Viewing Simple Content Access status

To see if Simple Content Access is enabled for an organization, look at one of the following places:

• Administer > Organizations - Look for a check mark in the Simple Content Access column for each organization.
• Content > Subscriptions > Manage Manifest - The toggle switch indicates current status.
• In addition, banners will be present on the Subscriptions and Content hosts pages. (Note that these banners will be removed in a future version)

Workflow changes compared to manual subscription management

Using Simple Content Access simplifies the workflow in several places in Katello:

Content host details page

• The Subscriptions tab is not available. Attaching subscriptions to content hosts is neither required nor allowed.
• Subscription Status shows “Simple Content Access.”
• System Purpose will never show a ‘Mismatched’ status. System Purpose attributes may still be set, as they are used for reporting.

Activation keys

• Activation keys may still be used to register hosts. However, attaching subscriptions to activation keys is neither required nor allowed. On the activation key details page, the Subscriptions tab is not available.
• On the activation key details page, the Repository list does not have a ‘Show All’ checkbox; rather, all repositories are always shown.

Other

• Auto-attach is no longer necessary anywhere, including activation keys, content hosts, or subscription-manager.
• On the dashboard, subscription-related widgets are not available.
• A new ‘Restrict to OS Version’ feature is available for custom repositories.

Restrict to OS Version

When using content (such as EPEL) relevant only to certain OS versions, previously it was common to create different custom products for each OS version. Content hosts using that OS version could then subscribe to that product, and thus only have access to the relevant content. However, since custom products are always enabled by default, and Simple Content Access allows all content hosts to access all products, this workflow is not possible with Simple Content Access enabled.

Instead, you can use the Restrict to OS Version feature. This will allow content to only be available on content hosts with the selected operating system.

To restrict a repository to a certain OS version

1. Create or edit a repository within a custom product.
2. Set Content Type to ‘yum’. (This feature only works with yum repositories.)
3. Set the ‘Restrict to OS Version’ field. Select ‘No restriction’ to make the repository available regardless of OS version, or select one of the other options to restrict the content.
4. The change will take effect on the next checkin. Or, to force the change immediately, run subscription-manager refresh on the content host to regenerate the entitlement certificates.
5. To confirm that the feature is working, run subscription-manager repos on the content host, and note that the repository is listed or not listed as appropriate. (Note that the product enabled/disabled status will not change in the Repository Sets details or anywhere else in the web UI.)

Note: Currently the Restrict to OS Version feature works only with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and is not supported on RHEL 6.9 and older.