FIX: Hung suse_register when connecting to local repo

We have legacy SLES 10 SP4 servers that needed to be rebuilt. After the usual AutoYaST unattended builds, we had to register it to a local repo managed using SMT (Subscription Management Tool, Novell's version of Red Hat Satellite). However, the registration to the Novell Customer Center hung.

As it turned out, it was waiting for data from ZMD, the Zen Management daemon. However, the ZMD service thinks it's still busy and fails to respond accordingly. suse_register needs data from ZMD to determine the installed products to be sent to the Customer Center, and with a broken ZMD, it cannot continue and just hangs there.

So, the ZMD service had to be restarted, but since it thinks it's still busy, the normal

/etc/init.d/novell-zmd stop

or

rczmd stop

invocations won't work. It had to be forcibly killed:

killall -9 zmd

After that, its cache, DB and log file needed to be removed:

rm -rf /var/cache/zmd/web/*
rm /var/lib/zmd/zmd.db /var/log/zmd-messages.log

(The log file had to be deleted to avoid sharing contention error.)

When everything is cleaned up, the daemon can be started again:

rczmd start

the repository can be fetched:

rug ping -a

and then registration process can continue:

clientSetup4SMT.sh
yast2 inst_suse_register

I'm not sure how it's done now in SLES 11 (we've since moved on to RHEL), but hopefully, they got rid of this abomination called the "Zen Management" suite.