Announcing Foreman Discovery Image 4.0

Hello everyone,

it is my pleasure to introduce you Foreman Discovery Image 4.0 which is the first official release based on CentOS 8 Stream. There are no new features but a lot changed under the hood, the OS components and the build process.

The future plans are to simplify discovery image, the main idea is that we do not necessary need the whole facter to report basic facts about system and smart proxy also serves very small purpose (reboot or kexec). There are ideas to replace this with a single script that would report very few facts and it would pull regularly from Foreman to initiate provisioning rather than implementing a web service. Other ideas include to base new generation of discovery image on remote execution feature. Let’s see what we end up with.

On the UI side, the team is working hard on redesigning the New Host / Edit Host page which is currently limited and contains some bugs (we do recommend only to use the quick or auto provisioning that only allows assigning hostgroups). The new form will be designed with discovery as the first-class citizen.

Anyway, you are here to download the new FDI build after all. Here it is:

https://downloads.theforeman.org/discovery/releases/4.0/

Have fun discovering your hosts.

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We have found out that the new build tool (Lorax) now puts the ESP image image under a different directory, therefore the FDI remaster script did not find it making the remastered images unbootable on EFI systems.

This is now fixed along with another bug which was making the remastered ISO slightly bigger due to not detecting hardlinks of the linux and init ram disk.

https://github.com/theforeman/foreman-discovery-image/commit/b94bf01e26be01edffc1290b8c726f2d6ecdceec

If you encounter issues with booting remastered FDI on EFI systems, use the updated remaster script. Cheers!

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