I’ve created a few topics in this forum under the “Support” category and they have all been silently ignored. The IRC seems empty/inactive to me. What is the proper path to obtain support? The questions I’ve been posing have been about how to use the product. I would not consider them bugs.
Hi, I’m not associated with the Foreman team, just a user, like you. Looking over your posts, I can say that the community really only supports the current and previous 2 versions. So that might be in play for some things.
Development moves rapidly on this project and we users are sort expected to keep up. I often upgrade in chunks, like from 1.18 to 1.21 in one maintenance window, then I’ll sit on 1.21 until 1.24 arrives. This allows me to have longer term version stability, but be reasonably current. If long term release stability & support is what you need, you might want to move towards buying Red Hat Satellite.
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I want to upgrade to the latest version of foreman, but one significant road block is that some of our proxy servers are CentOS 6, and there are only packages provided through 1.13.
I am fine if a response is “you can do it this way in version X”. It helps raise the priority of upgrading with upper management. In my most recent post, I purposefully left out the version with this reasoning in mind.
There’s not really even much direction on the main foreman web site on how to get help. There used to be a “contact us” page, but that’s gone now. The closest thing to it is the “Community” link to this site, where I can’t seem to get anyone to respond to me.
The IRC seems empty/inactive to me.
Are you definitely in the right channel? It’s #theforeman on freenode where there are 270 members according to my client (not #foreman where there are 8).
Yes, I have been going to #theforeman. Yes, there may be 270 users “logged in”, but that doesn’t mean that they’re actively monitoring the channel. When I post messages there, I rarely get a response. I rarely see any chatter when I’m in (even unrelated to what i’m asking about).
I see 658 posts today. What’s your nick (so I can say hello), and is it registered? https://freenode.net/kb/answer/registration
Hello,
Everyone on IRC works in a different timezone so sometimes it might happen that you would not get a quick reply. I think you should reconsider asking a question in the IRC 
Let me know if you are still facing problems with communication.
Thanks,
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I cannot confirm that the community forum or the IRC is inactive. From my experience I never waited longer than 1-2 days for replies on the forum or some hours in IRC.
Maybe it is related to your old version, I see 1.13. here on one of your posts. This version is almost 3 years old and therefore many users don’t know how to answer for sure.
Regarding “support”… there is no support besides the community. We help each other as good as possible but Foreman remains a community product. If you got some special using issues, the chance is present that no one encountered the same before.
Actually we like to say it’s a community project. There are several products you can buy based off Foreman codebase provided by several companies.
When you create a thread and it remains silent for a week, try again and think about rephrasing the text, also use as effective title as possible. Usually broad topics like “how do I upgrade 1.13 foreman to 1.22” are not good, you want to backup, clone, try it yourself and then ask about particular struggles you have.
Remember there is no contract between you as a user and our community, we do not have to reply “we don’t know”, basically if it’s something that nobody did then nobody will reply too. We will do our best tho, again particular problems, errors or issues have better luck than generic questions.
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There are several products you can buy based off Foreman codebase provided by several companies.
Other than Red Hat can you name some? I did not realize that Foreman was feeding other commercial enterprises beyond Satellite.
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Yes thanks, and I believe there is one or two other (also Germany-based) companies out there without named products but rather services around Foreman and Katello. I am very proud that our project can offer this, granted these are Red Hat competitors but probably typical customer size would be different. So it’s complementary and for the benefit of the community.
To answer the original question, I’ll echo what @Sean said. We have developers and users who joined after we dropped support for CentOS 6 and will have never done such a migration. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Upgrade foreman from 1.10 to 1.20 is a recent example.
As already has been said, there’s no SLA. That means you need to be somewhat lucky that someone responds. The best way to increase your chances is to be clear about the problem.
- Provide a clear problem description, ideally with specific errors and stack traces.
- Describe the environment. OS, versions, special things you think people should be aware of.
- Things you have already tried and didn’t work
This may be just true for myself, but because I’m busy, I’m more inclined to jump in when I need to put in less effort.
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