Foreman question

Posted by StatementOwn4896@reddit | linuxadmin | View on Reddit | 8 comments

Hi all, could use some help if you got a minute. I’ve set up a Foreman server to provision virtual machines (on hyper-v but I’m not utilizing the compute setup since I figure it’s not supported) and bare metal servers. So far for testing I’ve been setting up a test virtual machine to verify the functionality of the DHCP, TFTP, and provisioning process within my subnet I’ve created. So far everything works with the Debian preseed templates right out of the box but not the kickstart templates. I can’t quite rack my head around why though. I figure is there some extra preconfiguration step I must be missing somewhere?

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Loveangel1337@reddit

Because Foreman is a piece of shit.

Honestly, have you tried randomly re-creating every single template 10 times, smashing the VM up and rebuilding it? Sometimes it's that...

Or sometimes, you have to re-check every single template 10 times to realise one of them didn't template properly or one of the includes is messed up... iirc there was a way to see the full templated result...

Or maybe whatever pushes the templates out didn't capture this one and you'll find a missing option in the DHCP or in the pressed.

(Although, I've not touched it for... 3+ years now, and I'm a happier person for it!)

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logicclyx@reddit

Yeah this kinda sums up my Foreman experience too.

On the slightly more useful side: in Foreman, under Hosts → your test host → Templates, you can usually hit “Review” / “Preview” on the provisioning template and see the fully rendered kickstart it’s actually serving. That’s usually where the “oh, that variable is empty” or “wrong OS family selected so it picked the Debian-ish logic” moment happens.

Kickstart is way pickier than preseed about things like the right OS / OS family, architecture, and the correct provisioning template being associated with that OS. I’ve had it silently fall back to some default template that looked fine in the UI but rendered wrong for that specific host.

So I’d check the rendered kickstart for that host and make sure: - The right OS is selected on the host and in the OS settings - The kickstart template is actually associated with that OS - Any subnet / PXE templates line up with the same OS

If preseed works and kickstart doesn’t, it’s almost always some tiny mismatch like that rather than DHCP/TFTP being broken.

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derprondo@reddit

Katello was also so bad and so incapable of scaling to just 1500 machines that we had to abandon it. It literally caused us to dump Redhat licensing and switch to CentOS and Spacewalk LOL. This was about 10 years ago, no idea if it's any better now, I don't really do this type of work anymore.

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MedicatedDeveloper@reddit

Foreman sucks so much I ended up making my whole own kickstart templating and ipxe boot system. It's fine for repos and reporting but the network booting is so convoluted.

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revellion@reddit

Amen. Used to support and operate it for almost 7 years. Every release promising improvement. But never to the extent they were described