How did I renew Red Hat Developer Subscription

If you’re reading this post, it’s quite likely that you’re fully aware that Red Hat provide a no-cost Red Hat Developer Subscription for individuals. With this subscript you can use it run RHEL for free. The subscription only lasts one year, and when it expires it can’t be renewed. You must re-register.

I have a test RHEL vm, but I hardly use. So today when I turned it on and logged into it, the following message came up when i tried to update the system:

[root@sampeou ~]# dnf update
Updating Subscription Management repositories.

This system is registered with an entitlement server, but is not receiving updates. You can use subscription-manager to assign subscr
iptions.


*** WARNING ***
The subscription for following product(s) has expired:
  - JBoss Enterprise Application Platform
...
  - Red Hat Software Collections Beta (for RHEL Server)
  - dotNET on RHEL (for RHEL Server)
  - dotNET on RHEL Beta (for RHEL Server)
You no longer have access to the repositories that provide these products.  It is important that you apply an active subscription in order to resume access to security and other critical updates. If you don't have other active subscriptions, you can renew the expired subscription.
Error: There are no enabled repositories in "/etc/yum.repos.d", "/etc/yum/repos.d", "/etc/distro.repos.d".

Before I found this article [1], I tried to renew this free subscription to no avail. However, following [1], the steps to re-register is as the following:

1. Open developers.redhat.com in an Incognito window in Chrome, a Private window in Firefox, or an InPrivate window in Edge.
2. Use your Red Hat login ID to sign in to the site.
3. Acknowledge the provided Terms and Conditions.
4. Log out of all Red Hat sites and close your browser(s).
5. Wait 15 to 20 minutes, then log in to access.redhat.com/management.
6. You should now see a new Red Hat Developer for Individuals Subscription on your account.

I performed exactly the 6 steps above, wait for about 10 minutes, and voilla, my Red Hat Developer Subscription has been renewed/re-registered.

Back to my RHEL vm, I couldn’t still update the system.

[root@sampeou ~]# dnf update
...
You no longer have access to the repositories that provide these products.  It is important that you apply an active subscription in order to resume access to security and other critical updates. If you don't have other active subscriptions, you can renew the expired subscription.
Error: There are no enabled repositories in "/etc/yum.repos.d", "/etc/yum/repos.d", "/etc/distro.repos.d".
[root@sampeou ~]#

Flipping back to the article [1], and skip to the “Troubleshooting” section, additional steps need to be performed. Let’s do just that.

[root@sampeou ~]# subscription-manager remove --all
1 local certificate has been deleted.
0 subscriptions removed at the server.

[root@sampeou ~]# subscription-manager unregister
Unregistering from: subscription.rhsm.redhat.com:443/subscription
System has been unregistered.

[root@sampeou ~]# subscription-manager clean
All local data removed

[root@sampeou ~]# subscription-manager register
Registering to: subscription.rhsm.redhat.com:443/subscription
Username: agentsmith@live.com.au
Password:
The system has been registered with ID: 80f6d42a-5555-4444-xxxx-4f98e26c3b3a
The registered system name is: sampeou

[root@sampeou ~]# subscription-manager refresh
All local data refreshed

[root@sampeou ~]# subscription-manager attach --auto
Installed Product Current Status:
Product Name: Red Hat Enterprise Linux for x86_64
Status:       Subscribed

After that, I was able to run dnf update again.

Reference:

[1] How to renew your Red Hat Developer Subscription for Individuals