When managing large organizations with many admins of different levels I have a big problem with folks that reinstall machines for whatever reason but leaving the old entitlement in RHN. Its pretty clear how this may affect billing. Including billing where the Office of the President charges NCSU who charges each College which, in turn, charges departments and research groups. I would like to suggest that entitlements where the coresponding machine has not checked in in X days be removed from RHN. The time frame should be configurable. (Never or X number of days.) This feature should be configurable both at a site-wide level and individual groups.
Ah, as an example: The UNC System's RHN account currently has 1466 entitlements. 498 of them are "inactive." That's 34%.
We have generally avoided trying to put a policy in place as every customer tends to have different requirements for this. Some want it based on time, some customers want a set of systems that they never want deleted. I'll escalate this to our feature queue. FYI : you should be able to implement this through RHN XMLRPC APIs to whatever policy you would like. check out: https://rhn.redhat.com/rpc/api/system/list_user_systems/ https://rhn.redhat.com/rpc/api/system/delete_systems/ If you need help with APIs, you can of course contact Red Hat Support Services, who can even provide you with example scripts which use these APIs.
You can do this using script delete-old-systems-interactive from package spacewalk-utils It is already in RHN Satellite 5.4 you can run it as: delete-old-systems-interactive.pl -f --idle 20d