Installing the Foreman/Katello Project on CentOS 6.6

This article will cover the basic/default installation of Foreman project with the Katello plugin. We will be installing the most stable releases of Foreman (1.7), Katello (2.1), and Puppet to date of this article. We will not be using the nightly releases as I have found them to be buggy and inconsistent. Foreman provides the main interface for all the projects and handles the provisioning, monitoring and dashboard capabilities of your environment and the Katello project manages customized repositories and package management to all registered content hosts (will cover more of that in the next articles). Let's Begin!

Installing Foreman with Katello on Centos 6.6

1) Ensure that your hostname resolves correctly in DNS. Had a problem with the hostname that I had to resolve by correcting entries in the /etc/hosts file and also in the /etc/sysconfig/network file. Check ‘hostname -f’ against nslookup/host on other machines. Just be sure that you have consistency between your host and other devices on your network as puppet will not be happy if you don't!

2) Turn off iptables and ip6tables. Atleast during the installation process. It will make your life easier! Consult the Foreman documentation if you can't and need information on specific ports etc.

    

    # service iptables stop ; chkconfig iptables off

    # service ip6tables stop; chkconfig ip6tables off

3) Disable selinux. Pulp (service that runs inside Katello) and selinux aren’t currently playing nice. Open /etc/sysconfig/selinux in a text editor and set to disabled.

4) Install the following repos/versions. I didn't have luck with the nightly's so I did not use them.

   # rpm -ivh http://yum.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs-release-el-6.noarch.rpm

    # rpm -ivh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

    # yum install -y http://yum.theforeman.org/releases/1.7/el6/x86_64/foreman-release.rpm

    # wget http://dev.centos.org/centos/6/SCL/scl.repo -O /etc/yum.repos.d/scl.repo

    # yum install -y https://fedorapeople.org/groups/katello/releases/yum/2.1/katello/RHEL/6Server/x86_64/katello-repos-latest.rpm

5) Install Katello packs and grab a cold one. ~400 packages

    # yum install -y katello

6) Deploy Katello. This is install the defaults. See "katello-installer --help" for additional parameters and custom settings.

    # katello-installer

This will take several minutes to complete (so grab another cold one!). At this point though it will either fail or succeed. It will give you progress along the way and tell you why it failed in the event it does. On successful completion you should see something like below:

[root@hostname ~]# katello-installer

Installing             Done                                               [100%] [.]

  Success!

  * Katello is running at https://hostname.example.com

      Initial credentials are admin / mfmVBo6M7yFenvAp

  * Capsule is running at https://hostname.example.com:9090

  * To install additional capsule on separate machine continue by running:"

      capsule-certs-generate --capsule-fqdn "$CAPSULE" --certs-tar "~/$CAPSULE-certs.tar"

  The full log is at /var/log/katello-installer/katello-installer.log

This concludes the default installation process of Foreman with the Katello plugin. This is enough to get you going with the WEB UI and start poking around. There will be follow up blog posts that examine and explain the aspects of the project that make it so powerful.