Allow users to trigger reinstallation of their client from boot menu

Support
1

Problem: I want users to be able to reinstall their desktop from pxe menu

Expected outcome:

Foreman and Proxy versions:
1.17.0-1
Foreman and Proxy plugin versions:

Other relevant data:
[e.g. logs from Foreman and/or the Proxy, modified templates, commands issued, etc]

Hi,

is it possible to allow the users to trigger the reinstallation of their desktop themselves as additional pxe boot option?
that does not seem to be possible from the discovery image but I guess that’s not the purpose of the discovery image

would be optimal if they could also choose the os version to install

thanks in advance

funksen

2

If you can give them a login to Foreman, with appropriately restricted rights, then the process would be

  1. Navigate to your host
  2. Click Build
  3. Reboot host

Exactly what permissions you grant will depend on your needs of course, but it’s quite possible to lock users down to affecting only their own machines. There’s also an audit trail of user actions in case someone escapes their box :wink:

1 Like
3

Yes, this is possible. We do have a “hidden” feature called hostgroup provisioning but it’s a bit tricky to configure:

It aligns with your requirement - select a hostgroup from PXE menu, make a coffee, done. It can enable users to quickly destroy their laptops/workstations tho, take care.

3 Likes
4

thanks that’s exactly what I was looking for

great tutorial btw!

5

thanks for the response, I thought about that too, but I would prefer the method from pxe boot menu as lzap suggested

6

If you don’t have Katello plugin installed, things are little bit easier, but not so much. We want to improve this feature in the future.

7

thanks

I reinstalled the whole system without katello, not because of this issue, but I’m only installing centos and fedora desktops in an isolated subnet

the installer installed too much stuff I know nothing about, and the only thing I really needed was a http repository server

the foreman servers are fully licensed phyiscal rhel playing a lot of different roles, and if I need to reinstall the centos desktops with rhel because of support issues I might try out katello - would be really nice if I could install it on top of a running foreman installation someday

1 Like