Author: Marco Antonio Carcano

Managing Red Hat Network Satellite Clients With Puppet

Posted on 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.

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Install Katello Using Ansible

Posted on 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.

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Enable And Configure Ansible On Red Hat Network Satellite

Posted on 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.

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Puppet agent on Red Hat Network Satellite Clients

Posted on by Marco Antonio Carcano

Red Hat Network Satellite Server, as well as its upstream project Katello, enables you to easily manage the registered client hosts using Puppet: for this to work, you must first install the Puppet agent on the client host and register it to the Puppet master instance that is running on the Satellite (or on the Capsule).

This post is a step by step guide that does not only show you how to install and configure the Puppet agent on the client host: it also thoroughly describe how to create the Puppet product on the Red Hat Network Satellite Server 6 (or Katello), add repositories for the relevant architecture families, assign them to the right Content View and publish them into the right Lifecycle Environment.

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.

Mind that configuration management using Puppet is the oldest way of managing registered hosts on Satellite: the current way is using Ansible. Red Hat announced Puppet deprecation by Red Hat Network Satellite Server 7.0 in 2020. For this reason my suggestion is to quickly migrate from Puppet to Ansible. If you want to learn more on using Ansible with Satellite, please read Enable And Configure Ansible On Red Hat Network Satellite.

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Full featured C project managed by make and packaged as RPM

Posted on by Marco Antonio Carcano

The aim of this post is showing a tidy way to structure a C o C++ project managing the build lifecycle using the GNU Make and packaging it as RPM.

The post demonstrates a full featured C project managed by make and packaged as RPM, showing how to set up a tidy structure, develop and package a C application with its own shared objects, that reads the configuration from a file, validates settings, logs events into a file and handles error conditions printing to standard error and setting properly shell return code.

This post is certainly useful not only to developers, but to anybody who wants to learn how to build third part C or C++ software, since it clearly describes the compilation and linking process. In addition to that, we also learn how to create the product certificate that  can be exploited by the subscription-manager to know that the product is installed on the system.

The application is then packaged, besides as a gzipped tarball, also as RPM, creating the application package, the package with the development resource files (the C include files) and the package with the debug information that can be used with a debugger to troubleshoot things.

This post is focused on the C programming language, but the very most of the concepts related to  the build life-cycle managed with GNU Make shown apply to C++ too: I chose C only to show a way of doing things that works also with a legacy (but yet powerful) programming language. In addition to that, be wary that I'm striving to cover most of the scenarios: this means that I'm showing things that are not always necessary in every use case.

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Register Clients To Satellite Server 6 Or Katello

Posted on by Marco Antonio Carcano

Red Hat Network Satellite Server 6, as well as its upstream project Katello, has been developed to provide software to client hosts, as well as manage their configuration sending SSH remote commands or leveraging on Puppet or Ansible.

The published packages are provided by the means of content views with frozen packages versions.

The obvious requirement to benefit from the provided services is registering client hosts. This post shows how to register clients on Red Hat Network Satellite Server 6 or Katello, providing all the necessary information to be skilled enough on subscription-manager to be able not only to operate it, but to successfully troubleshoot when it is not working as expected.

In addition to that, we also see how to enable and configure SSH based remote actions and how to run an existing Job Template..

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