I noticed that satellite registration is failing on some servers with older operating systems.
When katello-ca-consumer is installed, it is modifying rhsm.conf and is introducing bad syntax in the [rhsm] section.  It appears that it is supposed to be inserting a newline (\n) but someone typo'd it and it is actually inserting \nn
This specifically is the line that is being inserted:
n#config for on-premise management

This is what the [rhsm] section looks like before anything is done:

[rhsm]
# Content base URL:
baseurl= https://cdn.redhat.com

And this is what it looks like after katello-ca-consumer is installed:

[rhsm]
# Content base URL:
baseurl= https://lnxfwisat.corp.pvt/pulp/repos
n#config for on-premise management
full_refresh_on_yum = 1

I do not see this on any RHEL 7 servers.


I found what is causing the problem in katello-rhsm-consumer.
From lines 284 and 285:

    full_refresh_config="#config for on-premise management\nfull_refresh_on_yum = 1"
    sed -i "/baseurl/a\n$full_refresh_config" $CFG

The "\n" is creating a literal "\n" instead of a new line:

n#config for on-premise management

The sed line should look like this:

sed -i "/baseurl/a $full_refresh_config" $CFG

(The \n is replaced by a space)

I even tested it myself just to be sure it worked as expected.


Any thoughts on to why this would be happening?

Cheers,

Ivan Windon