How to install Foreman/Katello with FQDN other than hostname on the node itself so smart proxies work

Support
1

Hi,

I know that is quite the subject title. Apologies for the -vvv level.

Problem:

In short, we have two new katello servers called katello03 and katello04.

DNS “A” records go to both them

katello03: 10.244.18.33
katello04: 10.244.18.34

We also have a DNS “A” record that is just called katello. Currently it points to the same IP of katello03.

katello: 10.244.18.33

The server already has content on there, content views, etc but there was an ask to make it all work with the FQDN of “katello” instead of katello03 to make hopefully make things easier if we ever need to change things in the future.

I attempted to reconfigure like with the hostname of the box itself being katello03:

foreman-installer
–scenario katello \
–certs-cname katello.foo.net
–certs-update-server
–foreman-proxy-foreman-base-url=“https://katello.foo.net”
–puppet-server-foreman-url=“https://katello.foo.net” \

After it finished the install I generated a new smart proxy tar ball and reinstalled it on the smart proxy connected to katello03 hoping it would work.

However, the smart proxies throw a 500 error and the clients can’t install packages.

Expected outcome:

Can this work? The GUI itself works great at katello.foo.net going to katello03.foo.net but we are hoping to get the smart proxies to work with this generic “A” record as well.

Perhaps I need to add:

–foreman-servername=“https://katello.foo.net”
–foreman-foreman-url=“https://katello.foo.net”

as well but wanted to see if what we are hoping to do is even feasible.

Foreman and Proxy versions:

Foreman 3.0 and Katello 4.2.1

Distribution and version:

CentOS 7.9

Thank you for information you may be able to provide,

  • Eledor
2

Hi @eledor, have you seen these instructions for renaming a server with the katello-change-hostname script? Administering Foreman

After you run the script, you should see instructions for what to do for each smart proxy.

3

Hi @rverdile,

Thanks for the reply! I read the link you sent but we don’t actually want to change the hostname of the boxes themselves. Meaning the output of:

hostname -f

Would be the same. What we would like to do is use a different FQDN, that still points to the same IP of the host.

So katello03.foo.org is the actual hostname of the node. 10.244.18.33

katello.foo.org is the other FQDN we would like to use (not the hostname of the node) and also points to 10.244.18.33

From my testing, and from the article you sent, I don’t think this is possible for the smart proxies to use this shared CNAME. We can get it to work for the GUI but the smart proxies insist on using the actual hostname of the node no matter what installer flags we provide.

Not a huge deal, we were just wondering if it was possible.

Cheers,

Eledor