When you install a stock Red Hat Linux system, it comes pre-configured to talk to Red Hat's corporate servers for any registration or update requests. This makes perfect sense, since the Red Hat servers are the only official place to obtain system updates for your Red Hat Linux system. With the advent of Current, however, this configuration becomes a limitation, since there now exists a way to provide an alternate source of package updates; a way that works seamlessly with Red Hat's up2date client.

A functioning Current server, however, is somewhat useless without clients that use it to obtain and install package updates. The clients must then be told about the new Current server by changing their configuration; there does not yet exist an intuitive graphical interface for this, so we have to modify the rhn_register and up2date configuration files by hand. Fortunately, this is fairly easy, thanks mostly to the foresight of Red Hat in developing a sane and easy to understand configuration file for these utilities.