3.4 Creating Subscriptions by Using the zman Command Line Utility

ZENworks Configuration Management allows you to create different types of subscriptions. Each subscription has its own set of data and configuration settings. Because it is difficult to pass the data as arguments in the command line, the zman utility requires XML files as an input to create subscriptions. To use the zman command line utility to create a subscription, you must have a subscription of the same type already created through ZENworks Control Center and export it to XML. You then use the exported XML file as a template to create subscriptions with zman.

For example, you can export a Novell Subscription already created through ZENworks Control Center in to an XML file, then use it to create another Novell Subscription with zman.

  1. Create a subscription in ZENworks Control Center.

    For example, create a Novell Subscription called NU that accesses the Novell Updates repository.

    For more information on how to create subscriptions by using ZENworks Control Center, see Creating Subscriptions by Using ZENworks Control Center.

  2. Export the subscription created in Step 1 to an XML file by using the following command:

    zman subscription-export subscription_name subscription_data.xml

    For example, export the NU subscription to NU.xml by using zman subscription-export NU NU.xml.

    If you want to create the subscription with new data, continue with Step 3. If you want to create the subscription with the same data as the NU subscription, skip to Step 4.

  3. To create a subscription with new data, modify the XML file according to your requirements.

    For example, change the value of <Base> from https://nu.novell.com/repo to the URL of the repository you want to access in the <RemoteServer> section of the XML file as shown below:

    <RemoteServer>
<Base>https://nu.novell.com/repo</Base>
<CredentialName>>/Credentials/NU</CredentialName>
</RemoteServer>

  4. To create a new subscription, with the same data as the template, use the following command:

    zman subscription-create new_subscription_name subscription_xml_filename.xml

    For example, to create NU1 subscription, run the zman subscripton-create NU1 NU.xml command.