Getting started with foreman

Foreman is a provisioning and complete life cycle management orchestration tool for managing infrastructure from a graphical interface and also from command line tool hammer-cli.

With computing resources in foreman supports managing different type of hosts like vmware, aws, baremetal, kvm, docker etc. to name a few.

Under the hood foreman uses DHCP, TFTP, PXE which are part of foreman-proxy, a component used to provision the choice of operating system to the hosts. The advantages of foreman it has puppet built in that can be used to provisioned hosts to manage via puppet for any configuration management after installation.

Installing foreman on centos 7. Before we begin with the install make sure hostname is set to unique other than localhost.localdomain:

hostnamectl set-hostname cipher.sand.box

Add the required repos for foreman:

rpm -ivh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
rpm -ivh http://yum.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs-release-el-7.noarch.rpm
rpm -ivh http://yum.theforeman.org/releases/1.9/el7/x86_64/foreman-release.rpm

yum install foreman-installer

To enable foreman-proxy execute the below command:

foreman-installer --enable-foreman-proxy

Adding firewall rules to allow foreman services:

firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=53/tcp
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=67-69/tcp
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=80/tcp
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=443/tcp
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=3000/tcp
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=3306/tcp
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=5910-5930/tcp
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=5432/tcp
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=8140/tcp
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=8443/tcp
firewall-cmd --reload

After the settings foreman can be accessed from https://ip.ip.ip.ip or https://server.sand.box hostname.