How to handle distribution upgrades with Foreman?

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1

I’m pretty new to Foreman and I’m not 100% sure if this is the right place to ask this question, but I’m trying to put in place a POC to see if I can reliably manage employees’ notebooks with Foreman.
The distribution of choice is Fedora and the Kickstarter template to install and configure it via PXE is already working.

Everything looks really good so far, including the integration with FreeIPA but, I was wondering how can/should a distribution upgrade be handled with Foreman.

For example, let’s assume that Foreman is also providing a mirror for the repositories of Fedora 29 and 30 and that I’m installing Fedora 29 on the notebook via Kickstarter template. What actions should be taken to correctly update the notebook’s Fedora version from 29 to 30? Can I simply call a sudo dnf system-upgrade download --refresh --releasever=30 ? The list of repositories, including the Fedora version, is provided by Foreman and, since the kickstarter is providing version 29, I guess Foreman will probably force this version of the repo back when the puppet agent will run again.

Any advice on how to correctly handle a distribution upgrade? Also, is there some official documentation regarding this topic? I wasn’t able to find any…

2

Hi leinardi, I have the same problem… Have you ever received an answer to your question? Or can you tell me how it works… Thanks! Best regards, Tom

3

Hi Tom, unfortunately I never got an answer to my question and I still have no clue on how to do a distribution upgrade with Foreman.

4

Hello,

I haven’t see such a request in our community yet. I haven’t tried myself.

But generally, I’ve upgraded several Fedora releases simply by changing repositories and calling yum upgrade. This was even one of the methods upgrading Fedora, but lately with introduction of “system-upgrade” plugin this is no longer a listed option on Fedora wiki.

You can try tho, I don’t know what exactly system-upgrade does but I don’t think it’s much. Possibly repostitory setup, some pre-upgrade checks and cleanups and stuff. Just try it and see.

5

Yes, it is basicly this. But it allows them also to do more changes like with a simple yum or dnf update, for example they could switch to a new default for the local logging if you are using the default without any config change. If I remember correctly this was the reason why the simple upgrade was never fully supported and the new tool was introduced to replace iso-based updates for simplicity.