Self manage foreman/katello with itself? (smart proxy also)

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Hello,

I think I already know the answer: NO, but it might have changed…

can I use my installation of foreman/katello to manage itself? I ask because it might be nice to not have to reserve an extra license at redhat for use only by the foreman server. Especially since it’s a single socket system…

similar question for the smart proxy: can I manage a smart proxy with the central foreman server?

If not, what is considered best practice?

foreman 3.9.1 with Katello 4.11.1 running on redhat 8.9.

–jason

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Generally I would say and also heard, no it’s not a good idea to manage a Foreman servers repos by itself.
That’s because if you do updates of the application it needs access to the repos during most of the time the foreman-installer runs.

But if you also have a separate smart-proxy, it should be no problem to manage the Foreman server through itself when it’s using the external smart-proxy as endpoint. (the smart-proxy must be online during the update period)
The same for smart-proxies, as long as they are not using themselves as client endpoint it should be no issue. (either the main Foreman server or another external smart-proxy)
I never tested this myself so far, so take it with a small grain of salt.

Cheers, lumarel

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You can manage the foreman server with repos on itself. Only during foreman upgrades, you‘ll have to disable the subscription manager plugin and enable local repos before you run foreman-installer. Even the rpm upgrades we first download from the main server, then stop all foreman services, and run the rpm upgrades from the cache. Anything else is no problem.

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yes, probably a very large grain of salt! :slight_smile:

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interesting: I thought to do this some years ago but couldn’t figure out the fs paths to use as the local repo. I had the impression that pulp pretty much made it so that you could ONLY go though the foreman/katello service…

is there a filesystem path I can point to for a local repo?

Thanks!

–jason

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With local repos I have meant the standard repo files in /etc/yum.repos.d/, i.e. the distro repos and the foreman/katello repos.

You cannot use pulp because pulp isn’t running at that time.

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Officially this isn’t supported for the reasons mentioned in this thread.

However, to reduce the downtime window we did merge this patch:

Perhaps that unintentionally makes it possible to self-manage.

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We use multiple Foreman/Katello installs, and they each point to each other for repos since you can’t really patch from yourself.

It makes sense if you have a test installation of Foreman or something, to go ahead and point your production Foreman infrastructure at that to do the maintenance of the Foreman itself.