Installing foreman on a vanilla minimal install RHEL9 system

Support
1
  • 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 katello:el9 pulpcore:el9

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

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.

2

I will get to this tomorrow, sorry for the delay.

3

Are you sure you’re reading the correct documentation for Foreman version 3.4? The dnf module command you posted refers to the “el9” as in RHEL 9 which is required from Foreman version 3.12, I believe? The document you linked that you followed doesn’t have the el9 mentioned anywhere. Please, double check that you’re on the correct version of the documentation in the top right corner of the page.

Good luck!

Note: Maybe you should consider upgrading to the latest supported version of Foreman with Katello. You can only upgrade one minor version at a time. No jumping over any of them or you can face major issues and broken installation. Pay attention to the jump from RHEL 8 to RHEL 9 at version 3.12. There is in-place upgrade guide available too.

4

Posted in the EL8 thread, I was able to get that package installed but did have some questions that may help with the debugging

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