Creating the Central Foreman Node

A central Foreman node provides a web interface and configuration control of other servers used for provisioning, configuration and operations. These other severs include DNS, DHCP, TFTP and Puppet services that interface with the central Foreman node using a "Smart Proxy" client.

Installation on Debian 7 Wheezy

Foreman is installed through a Puppet module with Puppet operating in stand-alone mode. This is a suitable approach for bootstrapping a Puppet Master that will run alongside Foreman. I also install puppet using Puppet Labs repository.

Enable Puppet Repository

Install puppet from apt.puppetlabs.com repository. For Debian 7, the commands are:

Install Puppet Agent

The version of Puppet I obtain is 3.3.2.

Foreman Repository

Install Foreman

We will use the Foreman installer to install Foreman and Puppet together on the same host.

The installer is now used to install Foreman and Puppet Master. It uses the Puppet Agent in standalone mode to download and configure the packages.

Successful Exit

This is what a successful install should look like.

Gotchas

List of issues I encountered

Case

Hostnames should be lowercase. The Foreman puppet modules fail on certificate generation when the certificate name is lowercase, but the modules check for the existence using the capitalized hostname. In general, hostnames should always be lowercase. I made a mistake in quickly naming a virtual server to use for this setup.