Installing foreman on a vanilla minimal install RHEL8 system

didds · June 2, 2025, 3:12pm

scenario: I inherited the admin of a foreman installation, with stuff all documentation from its previous admin. I’m learning on my feet, slowly, as i go along so if anything that follows seems daft, or Foreman 101, that’s why.

Ive done a bit more reading and background and have ended up trying to just install on a nice fresh vanilla rhel8 build unregistered to redhat.

Problem:
Trying to install foreman on a brand spanking new RHEL8 system registered to redhat
following install instructions at Quickstart Guide for Foreman with Katello on RHEL/CentOS

The installation fails with
]# dnf module enable pulpcore:el8
Updating Subscription Management repositories.
Puppet 7 Repository el 8 - x86_64 0.0 B/s | 0 B 00:00
Errors during downloading metadata for repository ‘puppet7’:

Curl error (56): Failure when receiving data from the peer for http://yum.puppet.com/puppet7/el/8/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml [Recv failure: Connection reset by peer]
Error: Failed to download metadata for repo ‘puppet7’: Cannot download repomd.xml: Cannot download repodata/repomd.xml: All mirrors were tried

even though I can successfully run curl -k http://yum.puppet.com/puppet7/el/8/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml

Expected outcome:
successful completion of foreman installation as per those foreman install directions etc

Foreman and Proxy versions:
foreman-release-3.4.1-1.el8.noarch

Foreman and Proxy plugin versions:
Dont know how to ascertain that

Distribution and version:
Dont know how to ascertain that

Other relevant data:
N/A

all and any help, pointers, advice gratefully received, but merely saying “go away and read about it” doesnt solve my predicament ie the official install instructions don’t work.

gvde · June 2, 2025, 3:36pm

I highly recommend to install on EL9 with the latest available version of foreman.

You do not want to install 3.4 on EL8 now and then go through ten upgrades including a leapp upgrade from el8 to el9 to get to the latest version.

cintrix84 · June 2, 2025, 5:50pm

+1 to what GVDE said

didds · June 2, 2025, 7:12pm

Firstly thank you both for what is undoubtably excellent advice.

sadly however my hands are tied - PRB decree currently we run RHEL8 so RHEL8 it has to be…

so (sadly) my questions remain the same.

That doesn’t YOU are wrong, just that I don’t have any choice.

cheers

cintrix84 · June 2, 2025, 7:14pm

Let me give the steps that you linked with a RHEL 8 system here. Sorry to hear you are locked into RHEL 8

didds · June 2, 2025, 7:17pm

aha. I misunderstood what cintrix84 meant - thanks for having a look.

(previous reply deleted)

didds · June 3, 2025, 10:25am

change of plan!

following the above suggestions I’ve spoken with the PTB aboput it and have approval to build a rhel9 system and install on that. This system to be patched registered to redhat, until this foreman is then built and updated for rhel9 packages etc etc and can support itself etc. (which is how we use it here).

So stand down for now, and from my perspective this thread is closed .

I’ll open another call if I have trouble with a rhel9 foreman build

didds · June 3, 2025, 1:28pm

gvde said:
“I highly recommend to install on EL9 with the latest available version of foreman.”

but the official install instructions at
Quickstart Guide for Foreman with Katello on RHEL/CentOS

says

so is rhel9 supported? eg by swapping out references for el8 to be el9

lstejska · June 3, 2025, 1:45pm

You are trying to install an unsupported (very) old version, 3.4.
The current version is 3.14, which only supports RHEL9. Quickstart guide for Foreman with Katello on Enterprise Linux

didds · June 3, 2025, 2:06pm

aha! thankyou! so much for google eh?

didds · June 4, 2025, 5:13pm

Oh well.

that hope was soon crushed.

So following the steps on lstejska’s comment above for RHEL9 and katello 3.14
https://docs.theforeman.org/3.14/Quickstart/index-katello.html

They all work fine until

dnf repolist enabled

Updating Subscription Management repositories.
repo id repo name
candlepin Candlepin: an open source entitlement management system.
foreman Foreman 3.14
foreman-plugins Foreman plugins 3.14
katello Katello 4.16
pulpcore pulpcore: Fetch, Upload, Organize, and Distribute Software Packages.
puppet7 Puppet 7 Repository el 9 - x86_64

dnf upgrade

Updating Subscription Management repositories.
Puppet 7 Repository el 9 - x86_64 0.0 B/s | 0 B 00:00
Errors during downloading metadata for repository ‘puppet7’:

Curl error (56): Failure when receiving data from the peer for http://yum.puppet.com/puppet7/el/9/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml [Recv failure: Connection reset by peer]
Error: Failed to download metadata for repo ‘puppet7’: Cannot download repomd.xml: Cannot download repodata/repomd.xml: All mirrors were tried

I get the same issue if I try puppet8 rather than puppet7.

Its clearly this repo file

cat puppet7-release.repo
[puppet7]
name=Puppet 7 Repository el 9 - $basearch
baseurl=http://yum.puppet.com/puppet7/el/9/$basearch
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-puppet7-release
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1

(or similar if puppet8 is used).

curl works fine despite the error message

curl http://yum.puppet.com/puppet7/el/9/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 1744163175 b508affc641bf8083f715b9aed4c4ad2bd94af3e f5294690c4d8fddd9b207fb6db8718798a02505b 1744163130 29590 671596 aecc7f7943cf84afd731f9c740c3fd4581632cb0 0ae4467fc9a5cbffdbf7c19f46f474431ee372da 1744163130 7230974 104482151 cf77c7c132c0f564544578e97e111b70b3408323 368f99c0a10d71e746c120b1af3f2b75dca03413 1744163130 3857 20496 15bc87b64721d92edd6101f15af35f4ef8e5a879 0a6f5b6dccc607311961d365504510b13e61588e 1744163136 134685 1208320 10 7893b279920c9f178f6a2dbca980f0c5e481f356 7c126ee85a556f8837c70a623f6904d26f0d5e8b 1744163175 5665542 44204032 10 4557ddf87a614163393b3ee72c9eb3400951d691 a8b2b5c6a61e19321717e035dc0bd10dd5407061 1744163135 5895 40960 10

cintrix84 · June 4, 2025, 6:13pm

I was able to pull down the package fine:

[root@foreman9 ~]# dnf install https://yum.puppet.com/puppet8-release-el-9.noarch.rpm
Updating Subscription Management repositories.
Foreman 3.14                                                                                                                4.1 MB/s | 1.5 MB     00:00
Foreman plugins 3.14                                                                                                        8.5 MB/s | 2.0 MB     00:00
Last metadata expiration check: 0:00:01 ago on Wed 04 Jun 2025 02:15:26 PM EDT.
puppet8-release-el-9.noarch.rpm                                                                                              31 kB/s | 9.3 kB     00:00
Dependencies resolved.
============================================================================================================================================================
 Package                                  Architecture                    Version                               Repository                             Size
============================================================================================================================================================
Installing:
 puppet8-release                          noarch                          1.0.0-10.el9                          @commandline                          9.3 k

Transaction Summary
============================================================================================================================================================
Install  1 Package

Are you using a proxy in between the Foreman install and the Puppet repo that could be causing an issue with SSL or a caching issue? Is the time correct on the system as well?

If you try to manually make the Puppet repo with the following contents in /etc/yum.repos.d/puppet. Repo

[puppet8]
name=Puppet 8 Repository el 9 - $basearch
baseurl=http://yum.puppet.com/puppet8/el/9/$basearch
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-puppet8-release
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1

Does it work when you run yum clean all ; dnf repolist -v