Managing Red Hat Network Satellite Clients With Puppet

Posted on March 19, 2022April 13, 2022 by Marco Antonio Carcano

Red Hat Network Satellite Server 6, as well as its upstream project Katello, enables you to easily manage the registered client hosts using Puppet: Managing Red Hat Network Satellite clients with puppet is certainly smarter, especially if compared to the way of doing configuration management of Satellite 5 (and so of Spacewalk).

The Satellite 6 is capable of handling multiple Puppet environments saving you from having to bother to manually configure and maintain them.

This post shows you how easy is creating a Puppet environment with Red Hat Network Satellite Server 6, and how to assign client hosts to it.

It shows:

how to create a Puppet repository that mirrors the online Puppetforge repository
how to publish some modules into a specific Environment of a selected Content View
how to assign Puppet modules to an host group, so that every client host belonging to it inherit them
how to customize the parameters of the modules assigning values only to client hosts that belongs to a host group that matches the assignment criteria.

The Linux distribution used in the examples is CentOS 7, but you can of course easily adapt it to any other Red Hat and derived Linux distribution.

Install Katello Using Ansible

Posted on March 14, 2022April 21, 2022 by Marco Antonio Carcano

Installing Katello (the upstream project of Red Hat Network Satellite Server 6) and provisioning Foreman proxies (that are the upstream software of the Red Hat Network Satellite Server 6 Capsules), same way as installing software in general, is a typical time consuming and error prone task that is often convenient to automate in some way.

Ansible can be easily exploited to automate Katello installation having it to:

ensure that the target system meets the minimal requirements
automatically partition the system in the most convenient way
install everything taking in account of using the right versions of the involved packages so as to avoid installation failure because of wrong dependencies
set up all the configurations that are required to improve the usability of the installed environment
take care of issuing all the necessary statements to configure a Foreman proxy (a Capsule) on Katello (the Satellite) and automatically provision it

This post, based on CentOS 7, shows how to structure an Ansible project developing playbooks that either install Katello or install and configure Foreman proxies (Capsules, in Red Hat Network Satellite Server 6 terms). In addition to that, the playbooks can also be used to reconfigure the provisioned Katello or Foreman proxies, for example to enable plugins. In this post we also see how to install the "theforeman.foreman" Ansible galaxy collection along with its dependencies, that enables the management of Katello using Ansible.

Enable And Configure Ansible On Red Hat Network Satellite

Posted on March 8, 2022June 28, 2022 by Marco Antonio Carcano

Red Hat Network Satellite Server 6, as well as its upstream project Katello, enables you to easily manage the registered client hosts using Ansible.

Conversely from Puppet, that requires the client to install the agent package and to be registered to the Puppet master running on the Satellite or Capsule, Ansible does not require installing anything client side, since it relies on SSH or, to tell it in Red Hat Network Satellite 6 terms, it relies on remote execution with SSH. The only thing that is required to manage the client hosts of the Satellite using Ansible is enable and configure remote execution and the Ansible plugin on the Satellite itself and on any Capsule you want to use.

This post shows you how to enable both remote execution with SSH and the Ansible plugin on the Satellite. To ensure that everything is properly working, we also run the ansible ping module.

The Linux distribution used in the examples is CentOS 7, but you can of course easily adapt it to any other Red Hat and derived Linux distribution.