mjhjmtu

I am currently working on a virtual machine that is running Red Hat 4.1.2-41. When I attempt to install a software package, I get the following error:

 up2date_client.up2dateErrors.AbuseError: 
 Error Message:
 Abuse of Service detected for server supplierweb (1019016735)
 Error Class Code: 49
 Error Class Info: 
 You are getting this error because RHN has detected an abuse of
 service from this system and account. This error is triggered when
 your system makes too many connections to Red Hat Network. This
 error can not be triggered under a normal use of the Red Hat Network
 service as configured by default on Red Hat Linux.

 The Red Hat Network services for this system will remain disabled
 until you will reduce the RHN network traffic from your system to
 acceptable limits.

 Please log into RHN and visit https://rhn.redhat.com/help/contact.pxt
 to contact technical support if you think you have received this
 message in error.

OK, so it seems that I have too much traffic going through the Red Hat network. I used the top command to check my processes and got this:

top - 09:07:33 up 18:07, 3 users, load average: 0.35, 0.33, 0.15
Tasks: 185 total, 3 running, 182 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 50.0%us, 50.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 2177252k total, 1091260k used, 1085992k free, 190420k buffers
Swap: 2031608k total, 0k used, 2031608k free, 453392k cached

This is my VM that my company has set up for me, and the 3 users are me as a regular user, root (also me), and my manager, who is not using the VM and doesn't care if I reboot or whatever.

Can I assume that 185 tasks is maybe too many running, and this is the cause of the excessive traffic to the RH network? If so, what processes can I generally close without affecting operation?

The number of tasks you have running on your machine is completely unrelated to traffic to Red Hat's site. Red Hat is a software provider, not a service provider. Your programs are executing on your machine; the only program that connects to Red Hat is the package manager, when it's downloading packages for installation.

The top output is showing that your machine's CPUs are fully occupied. Are you running both CPU-intensive (the 50.0%us) and IO-intensive (the 50.0%sy) tasks? Below the headers, you'll see which processes are running. If you don't know what these processes are doing, post the full page of output from top and we'll help. If you don't care about rebooting, reboot and see what happens next.

If you don't have a hundred instances of the package manager running in the background, there's a good chance that your virtual machine provider is at fault. It's possible that you're sharing resources intended for one machine with other virtual machines. Contact your virtual machine provider for support.

Security manager had to complete install of RHEL license for the machine. It was as simple as that :-/