How to start with Foreman

This post targets primarily users new to Foreman. It can be interesting for those, who would like to start using Foreman but feel lost or who just installed Foreman and would like to investigate its capabilities. We’ll assume a fresh Foreman installation without any plugin and with the default configuration. The primary focus will be on on filling in the data about the infrastructure. If you’re searching for installation instructions, please take a look at Installing Foreman chapter of the Foreman manual. This post assumes installation using the foreman-installer.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://theforeman.org/2020/12/how-to-start-with-foreman.html
2 Likes

Thank you for dropping this Xmas present to the foreman community. This article is exactly what I need to move forward with foreman/katello.

1 Like

One suggestion, please import your article into Google Doc or other work-processing software. I found many spelling typos after converting into gdoc.

Good idea, will do for the next post. I plan to talk about ongoing inventory updates next time, if you have some other topic you’re interested in, let me know.

1 Like
  • I was able to follow the howto to add existing un-managed fedora 32 physical machine like following

    image

  • Question is how do I manually install puppet agent to have it fully managed with metric info ?

  • can you add notes about above task into your article ?
    To complete adding existing host manually.

dnf install -y puppet
systemctl enable --now foreman.test.lan
puppet agent -t --server foreman.test.lan

  • Adding puppet agent to puppet master on foreman.test.lan ended up following.

[root@ipa01 ~]# puppet agent -t --server foreman.test.lan
/usr/share/ruby/vendor_ruby/puppet/util.rb:461: warning: URI.escape is obsolete
/usr/share/ruby/vendor_ruby/puppet/util.rb:461: warning: URI.escape is obsolete
/usr/share/ruby/vendor_ruby/puppet/util.rb:461: warning: URI.escape is obsolete
/usr/share/ruby/vendor_ruby/puppet/util.rb:461: warning: URI.escape is obsolete
/usr/share/ruby/vendor_ruby/puppet/util.rb:461: warning: URI.escape is obsolete
/usr/share/ruby/vendor_ruby/puppet/util.rb:461: warning: URI.escape is obsolete
/usr/share/ruby/vendor_ruby/puppet/util.rb:461: warning: URI.escape is obsolete
/usr/share/ruby/vendor_ruby/puppet/util.rb:461: warning: URI.escape is obsolete
/usr/share/ruby/vendor_ruby/puppet/util.rb:461: warning: URI.escape is obsolete
Info: Caching certificate for ca
/usr/share/ruby/vendor_ruby/puppet/util.rb:461: warning: URI.escape is obsolete
/usr/share/ruby/vendor_ruby/puppet/util.rb:461: warning: URI.escape is obsolete
Info: csr_attributes file loading from /etc/puppet/csr_attributes.yaml
Info: Creating a new SSL certificate request for ipa01.test.lan
Info: Certificate Request fingerprint (SHA256): E7:C6:34:E6:40:DF:97:51:0D:35:33:7F:2F:B8:2B:3D:09:45:B5:A6:A0:1C:1A:82:2A:6E:9C:A3:B9:6F:0F:11
/usr/share/ruby/vendor_ruby/puppet/util.rb:461: warning: URI.escape is obsolete
/usr/share/ruby/vendor_ruby/puppet/util.rb:461: warning: URI.escape is obsolete
Info: Caching certificate for ca
/usr/share/ruby/vendor_ruby/puppet/util.rb:461: warning: URI.escape is obsolete
/usr/share/ruby/vendor_ruby/puppet/util.rb:461: warning: URI.escape is obsolete
/usr/share/ruby/vendor_ruby/puppet/util.rb:461: warning: URI.escape is obsolete
Exiting; no certificate found and waitforcert is disabled
[root@ipa01 ~]#

I’ll try to cover this in the next post, however this should be well described in our manual, see chapter 3.5.5. The key is to deploy the facts and reports callback on your puppetserver (it’s already there if you used foreman-installer).

1 Like

Nice content indeed, great work.