Any machine running SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP2 or later can be configured to register against SMT and download software updates from there, instead of communicating directly with the Novell Customer Center and the NU servers.
If your network includes an SMT server to provide a local update source, you need to equip the client with the server's URL. As client and server communicate via the HTTPS protocol during registration, you also need to make sure the client trusts the server's certificate. In case you set up your SMT server to use the default server certificate, the CA certificate will be available on the SMT server at http://FQDN/smt.crt . In this case you do not have to manually set the certificate: The registration process will automatically download the CA certificate from there, unless configured otherwise. You have to enter a path to the server's CA certificate if the certificate was issued by an external certificate authority.
NOTE: Registering Against *.novell.com Subdomain
If you try to register against any *.novell.com subdomain, the certificate will not be downloaded during registration for security reasons, and certificate handling will not be done. In such a case, use a different domain name or a plain IP address.
There are several ways to provide this information and to configure the client machine to use SMT. The first way is to provide the needed information via boot parameters at boot time. The second way is to configure clients using an AutoYaST profile. There is also the clientSetup4SMT.sh script. This script can be run on a client to make it register against a specified SMT server. In SLE 11 you can now set the SMT server URL with the YaST2 registration module during installation. These methods are described in the following sections: