Select another interface for remote execution massively

Support
1

Problem:
I have like 900 hosts already registered, and I’m updating them through remote execution. I encountered that a lot of them do not have the right network interface selected for remote execution (a considerable number of hosts have more than 2 network interfaces registered).

Expected outcome:
I would like to know If there’s a way to change the network interface for remote execution through CLI or something to work around other than doing it through foreman > all hosts > desired_host > interfaces

Foreman and Proxy versions:
F 3.2
K 4.4

Foreman and Proxy plugin versions:

Distribution and version:
Oracle Linux Server 8.5

Other relevant data:
I was thinking with some hammer CLI, but I would like to know If there’s another way.

2

It should be doable using hammer on 3.3, but I’m afraid the changes didn’t get into 3.2.

There are some quirks which make this cumbersome in pre-3.3 and which were removed in 3.3. Remote execution has some checks that enforce that a host:

  1. does not have more than 1 execution interface
  2. If the host does not have an execution interface, the primary interface becomes the execution interface

For example let’s take this host

# hammer host interface list --host flowing-escargot.example.com 
---|------------|-------------------------------------------|-------------------|-----------------|-----------------------------
ID | IDENTIFIER | TYPE                                      | MAC ADDRESS       | IP ADDRESS      | DNS NAME                    
---|------------|-------------------------------------------|-------------------|-----------------|-----------------------------
2  | eth0       | interface (primary, provision, execution) | 00:16:3e:10:8e:84 | 192.168.125.181 | flowing-escargot.example.com
3  | lo         | interface                                 |                   | 127.0.0.1       | localhost                   
---|------------|-------------------------------------------|-------------------|-----------------|-----------------------------

If I try to set lo to be the execution interface, it fails because eth0 is already an execution interface (see 1). If I try to unset eth0 as execution interface, it will immediately get re-marked as execution because it is also a primary interface.

As a workaround (this should work even in possibly any version), we can perform both changes at once with curl

# cat <<EOF >/tmp/json
{"host": {
  "interfaces_attributes": [
    {"id": 2, "execution": false},
    {"id": 3, "execution": true}
  ]
}}
EOF

# curl -X PUT https://$FOREMAN_FQDN/api/hosts/$HOST_ID -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -u $USER:$PASS -d @/tmp/json
-----B<-----SNIP-----B<-----

# hammer host interface list --host flowing-escargot.example.com 
---|------------|--------------------------------|-------------------|-----------------|-----------------------------
ID | IDENTIFIER | TYPE                           | MAC ADDRESS       | IP ADDRESS      | DNS NAME                    
---|------------|--------------------------------|-------------------|-----------------|-----------------------------
2  | eth0       | interface (primary, provision) | 00:16:3e:10:8e:84 | 192.168.125.181 | flowing-escargot.example.com
3  | lo         | interface (execution)          |                   | 127.0.0.1       | localhost
3 Likes
3

Thank you! I’m gonna check on this workaround!