Hi @John_Mitsch , I’ll take a stab at this. First, given all that has been said about the flexibility of Foreman/Katello and the many ways it can be configured, I think it would be helpful for you to understand the specific context I’m working in. You can see exactly what my goal is, my requirements and the current process I’m following in an attempt to achieve my goal here.
Early stumbling blocks
Trying to make sense of exactly what services Foreman provides in a fresh installation
When I first looked at the documentation I saw this drawing and thought, “oh good I can see a high level overview of Foreman, get a basic idea of what each of its services do and see what will be installed and made available to my lab environment”. Unfortunately, while smart proxies and Foreman’s provisioning model make sense conceptually, I found that there was no clear path to understanding what my lab environment was actually going to look like and what steps I would need to take to bootstrap the environment. I assumed that authoritative DNS, DHCP and TFTP would be an integral part of an initial install In hindsight I now see why this was a dumb assumption, given that many environments will already have DNS and DHCP in place. I also assumed that I could start with Foreman, get the basic provisioning working and then layer on the complexity of Katello and its associated content management. I was surprised to learn that wasn’t the case, which started me down the path of trying to get everything up and running all at once. I understand that Katello is technically a separate project, but given that installing it after installing Foreman, isn’t really feasible; it doesn’t really make sense for it not to be prominently displayed in the Foreman documentation, especially that architecture drawing.
Getting my head around the integration between Foreman and Katello
It’s still not clear to me exactly what needs to be in place, within Foreman and Katello, in order to be able to successfully provision a new bare metal host using PXE.
Getting my head around Katello concepts and what is a reasonable starting point
Products, repos, content views, composite content views, subscriptions, activation keys, etc… There is a lot of abstraction going on here and an opinionated process about how managed hosts will consume content from Katello, yet I can find no resources that provide a simple overview of how this is supposed to work or what the best practices are. As evidenced by my recent response to another new user that is trying to make sense of Katello’s content management, it’s clear that I still don’t really get some of these concepts.
Trying to produce a repeatable automated install
Given my interest in Foreman, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that I want my Foreman server to be built in a repeatable fashion. I really don’t like hand built systems, especially when the process is a dark art and I’m trying to protect my company from a scenario where I’m hit by a bus (or maybe something more fun like a mountain biking accident). As I move forward on this project and I see how complex the installation process is, this desire for a repeatable installation process becomes more of a necessity. Even after getting my head around some of the documentation gotchas, chicken and egg problems with bootstrapping a lab environment from scratch and beginning to make conceptual sense of how Katello fits into the mix, I’m still not at the point where I have created an automated process for delivering the base level of functionality that I’ll need for provisioning new hosts. I keep running up against against surprising issues.
For example, I learned that setting a default org and loc in the Katello answer file, doesn’t actually set the default org and loc. If after completing the install, I run hammer defaults list I see nothing. However, if I use Hammer to set the default org and loc, then a bunch of subsequent hammer commands (such as hammer architecture list) will fail with a useless message. I had to work out, through trial and error, that the correct approach is not to set the default org and loc (either in the answer file or via Hammer), but to instead provide the org and loc for commands such as hammer subnet create. This has been a slow and error prone process.
At this time, I currently have an install script that configures a fair bit of Foreman and Katello’s basic features, but much to my frustration I still find that I can’t yet create a host via the GUI, without having to make further config changes. Essentially, I still don’t understand what are the minimum requirements for a Foreman/Katello installation that will allow me to successfully provision a new host.
Summary of my initial impressions
Overall, I get the impression that most people must build their Foreman/Katello servers by hand and they probably just fight with it until it works, after that they just trust that it will stay running and they worry more about the hosts that they will build and manage with Foreman/Katello. In order to get to the point of a fully working system, I assume that most people will have been in the community for some time and will have absorbed some of the tribal knowledge of the community, so they manage to avoid the sharp edges and dead ends during the initial setup process. I’m not comfortable with that approach, which is why I’m happy to see so much recent interest being paid to improving the installation process, the documentation and the overall new user experience.
I’m sure I have missed things that would have helped to paint a more clear picture, but hopefully what I have provided helps.