It's been a while since I last wrote a blog, but that doesn't mean I've been slacking off. In the next series of blog posts, we'll be looking at some of the new things in Foreman 1.2. But today, I want to make a small diversion...
I recently got some new hardware in the house, courtesy of my employer, so I decided it was time to play with one of the other virtualization technologies out there.
So as many of you know, I use Archlinux on a lot of my hardware - but you’ll have noticed that I always use Debian for my Foreman servers. What gives?
The Problem with Versions Archlinux presents two major problems to Foreman. Firstly, the current version of Puppet in the AUR is 3.0.1. Admitedly, I made that problem for myself, since the AUR PKGBUILD of Puppet is owned by me… However, Arch is all about latest-and-greatest so it’s the right thing to do for Puppet.
So I've been managing the Debian packages for about 8 months now, and every so often I get asked if there's anything people can do to help. I have to answer "Not really" because the way we're building the Debian packages is somewhat arcane.
At least, it was. This blog is to tell you all about how it's now much more open.
Packaging in the openThe first piece of the puzzle starts with our foreman-rpms repo (github.
This blog post has been in my to-write pile for nearly 4 months now. I have two laptops at home, both of which are capable of running a few virtual machines. If you missed the news, I now work on Foreman full time, so obviously I want to use Foreman to manage my virtual machines. So it seems like the perfect opportunity to give you a blog post about getting Libvirt set up on a host of your choice (in this case, my laptop).
Sigh. Nothing stays still in the tech world, does it? :)
The Archlinux Releng team have drastically altered the method for installing Archlinux since I wrote my previous article. In particular, they have dropped AIF and resorted to simple bash commands for installation.
This actually makes our life for Foreman much easier, but I thought I should write a small blog post to tell you how to use it.
Welcome back! In Part 1, we got our server set up to build Archlinux machines. Now we need to configure Foreman to make use of it! Let's get started...
UI configuration Operating System setupFirstly we need the Operation System. If you already have some Archlinux clients, this might already be done, but head over to the Operating System page:
and either edit the existing Archlinux OS, or create a new one if need be:
The Foreman developers have just merged a small patch which allows the UI to detect and correctly display Archlinux hosts. This means it's now possible to configure Foreman to do automated installs of Archlinux, just as you would for Debian or RedHat. This makes me happy, as people who know me might guess!
The problemThe thing is, Archlinux isn't easy to net-install. It pains me to say it (because I'm a big fan of Arch), but their approach to automated installs just doesn't fit with how super-smooth the rest of the distro is.