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On Fri 11 May 2012 15:04:51 BST, Lard Farnwell wrote:
Hi Foremen,
I am confused about host creation. I think it’s because I want to use it in a non-standard way.
If I don’t have any hypervisors/PXE/proxy set up can I create a host through the web UI? – Obviously it wouldn’t be provisioned automatically via virtualisation or anything, but can I create it so it is there in foreman. What happens now is I put a name in and configure host groups puppet classes and IP etc. and when I press create nothing happens it just refreshes the host creation page. Am I doing something wrong or is this a bug? I am on latest version as of a few hours ago (thanks to the foreman installer and helpful people on the dev mailling list 
).
Another thing I don’t understand is that it requires me to set a mac address. When testing I just put in a random one to see what happens. What if I don’t know the mac address at the time of creation? In the host provisioning screencast it seems like the smart proxy magics away this restriction.
The main reason I am asking about this is because I want to leverage foreman to provision FreeBSD jails. Jails are like VMs that all share the same live kernel but have a separate process/user environments via chrooting. it would be really easy to do this if I was able to create hosts without mac addresses and then use something like Feature #1194: Support hooking into host creation/deletion - Foreman to actually do the provisioning via auto SSHing into the jail host and creating the jail with parameters from foreman. Jails don’t have mac addresses. In our environment we simply distribute virtual interfaces with different IPs via OSPF.
Thanks in advance. I am very excited to hear your response. My boss has given me time/support to contribute to this project if I can get the above mentioned functionality.
Lard
Lard,
Sounds liek you’re trying to avoid using what we call Unattended mode -
i.e just controlling Puppet as an ENC/reporting tool. That’s totally
supported, and what I did when I first starting using Foreman.
However, it’s one of the few settings that cannot be changed in the UI,
so go into your config/settings.yaml file and set :unattended: to
false, and restart Foreman. Now, when creating a host, you’ll have far
fewer tabs to fill in.
If you want to use some of the management tools, like using a proxy
to create dhcp/dns reservations, then unattended mode will need to be
on. In that case, it needs the Mac address in order to create the DHCP
reservations. As for using jails, I think Foreman requires that the
MAC is unique per host, so with Unattended switched on, you’ll hit
problems. That sounds like a feature request to me.
You can indeed “make up” MAC addresses, but I seem to recall Foreman
will update them from facts when machines check in, so you may find
conflicts down the line with that approach.
Another option is to leave Unattended on, but to switch hosts to
Unmanaged mode. Unfortunately this button only exists after the host
is created, so at creation you’ll have to make up a MAC. This gives you
the most flexibility, since you can manage the physical hosts
completely and keep the VMs/Jails in Unmanaged mode. Ohad, should the
"Unmanage Host" button be present when creating a new host?
In short, switch off Unattended should get you started, although
management of DHCP/DNS will remain out of Foreman’s control. After
that, you can play around a bit
Hope that helps,
Greg
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