I am new in Foreman/Katello so please excuse my lack of knowledge and expertise.
I’ve deployed Foreman along with Katello 3.15 - and all works well.
There’s only one but - because I am not always managing end points and devs/ops are quite often changing client host names (dev environment) or switching boxes off and other weird stuff, so I got probs with puppet agent being not responsive (time diff), or generating new keys (new host name) or whatever.
I am not using puppet for automation or anything at all (ansible does the job).
So do I actually need it? Is it a way to disable it?
If yes - will I still be able to see erratas applicable for clients? And - important- is it possible to switch off on dashboard and client details info that puppet is not reporting?
I am running without puppet on the clients, just installing subscription-manager, katello-host-tools and katello-host-tools-tracer and then using remote execution for updates and such. Only issue is with the Configuration that sometimes go “Out of sync” on the hosts even if I have " Puppet out of sync disabled = Yes" and “Ansible out of sync disabled = Yes”. Have not really been able to pin this issue down yet.
Foreman has a strong relationship with Puppet, back in the days Puppet (ENC) was the only and primary feature of Foreman. However Foreman evolved into something that nobody would ever dream of.
We are currently working on removing most of the Puppet code into a plugin so users could install Foreman without Puppet. Also many screens are heavily build around Puppet too - we want to put Puppet on the same page as other plugins so everyone has a good user experience.
This, however, will take a lot of effort. Stay tuned for news.
For what it’s worth, even today it’s perfectly possible (and has been for years) to install without Puppet. The RFC to default to off (which hasn’t been implement yet) documents the options to do so.
