How to unregister a SUSE Manager Client

This document (7013242) is provided subject to the disclaimer at the end of this document.

Environment

SUSE Manager
SUSE Manager 3.2
SUSE Manager 4

Situation

A client is registered to SUSE Manager, but needs to be unregistered. Please notice most of this TID does not apply to Red Hat Expanded Support systems.

Resolution

This process should NOT be followed for clients running Red Hat OS. For such clients, unregistering from SUSE Manager web-UI, deleting repositories with yum and deleting /etc/sysconfig/rhn/systemid should be enough.

Traditional client

NOTE: This process is only for SUSE Manager clients, do not run it on the SUSE Manager itself.

First of all, the osad client should be stopped on the system (in case it is being used, SLES 15 doesn't use it):

SLES 11:

rcosad stop

SLES12:

systemctl stop osad

In order to unregister a SUSE Manager client, several rpms must be removed. The following method should be tried first (in case there is no osad package, it should be omitted):

zypper rm -u spacewalksd spacewalk-check zypp-plugin-spacewalk spacewalk-client-tools osad python2-zypp-plugin-spacewalk python2-spacewalk-check python2-spacewalk-client-setup

This will show the following:

Refreshing service 'spacewalk'.

Loading repository data...

Reading installed packages...
Resolving package dependencies...

The following packages are going to be REMOVED:
spacewalk-check spacewalk-client-setup spacewalksd zypp
plugin-python osad

5 packages to remove.
After the operation, 301.0 KiB will be freed.
Continue? [y/n/?] (y):

The above rpm packages are client specific, and should be removed.
If this fails, they should be manually removed. The commands "rpm -e" should not be used unless the "zypper rm" command above failed.

rpm -e spacewalk-client-setup spacewalksd spacewalk-check zypp-plugin-spacewalk osad python2-zypp-plugin-spacewalk python2-spacewalk-check python2-spacewalk-client-setup

On SLES 15 client remove below packages if installed:

rpm -e spacewalk-client-setup mgr-daemon spacewalk-check zypp-plugin-spacewalk mgr-osad python3-zypp-plugin-spacewalk python3-spacewalk-check python3-spacewalk-client-setup

After this is complete, the following file should be removed: /etc/sysconfig/rhn/systemid.

That file only exists on a client machine and is used to register itself with SUSE Manager.

rm /etc/sysconfig/rhn/systemid

Any configured spacewalk channels should be deleted with:

rm /etc/zypp/repos.d/spacewalk*

When this is done, the repositories should be refreshed on the server (zypper ref -s), and then listed (zypper lr), in order to make sure everything looks good.

If any repositories pointing to spacewalk still exist, remove them using the following:

zypper repos -d
zypper removerepo <ID of the repo in the output from previous command>

Salt client

Stop salt minion:

on SLES 12 / SLES 15 stop the salt minion service using:

systemctl stop salt-minion

and on SLES 11 based systems

rcsalt-minion stop

Remove repositories and configs:

rm /etc/zypp/repos.d/susemanager\:channels.repo

rm -r /etc/salt/

Delete the client RPMs of salt (as the channel data was removed before, rpm -e needs to be used here):

rpm -e salt salt-minion python2-salt

SLES 15 clients use python3-salt instead of python2-salt:

rpm -e salt salt-minion python3-salt

SUSE Manager Server:
Now the system can be removed from the inventory using the SUMA Server WebUI, or from command line using spacecmd:

spacecmd system_delete FQDN

salt-key -d FQDN

For very specific cases, the registration might still not be possible after having unregistered the minion. As a last result, a couple of salt files should be deleted in the master before trying to register again:

rm /var/cache/salt/master/thin/version
rm /var/cache/salt/master/thin/thin.tgz

Disclaimer

This Support Knowledgebase provides a valuable tool for SUSE customers and parties interested in our products and solutions to acquire information, ideas and learn from one another. Materials are provided for informational, personal or non-commercial use within your organization and are presented "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND.