With default settings Foreman does not allow Puppet Agents to specify their own environment when connecting to the Puppetserver. This makes it impossible to use r10k and feature branch workflow like you can with a normal Puppetserver. This behavior can fortunately be reverted easily by modifying Foreman configuration file, /etc/foreman/settings.yaml:

# Allow testing feature branches on nodes
:enc_environment: false

After modifying settings restart the webserver, e.g.

Recently we had to reprovision a bare metal server that was in Foreman and had IPMI support. The goal was to check if our automated “force-join to FreeIPA domain after reprovisioning” logic worked as intented. We did not have access to any graphical IPMI console, nor Foreman’s GUI, so we had to do everything from the command-line. The host we reprovisioned was a CentOS 7 instance. It is assumed that IPMI tools are installed. This post was inspired by the Automate SuperMicro Server Provisioning or Die Trying blog post.

The PHP version comes in default CentOS 7 repositories is rather horribly outdated. This is problematic when running Wordpress, which has to be upgraded constantly, and really old PHP versions may not be accepted, security-patched or not. The solution is to get updated PHP from the remi yum repositories. There are two sets of PHP packages as described here:

• Install updated packages that replace the old PHP 5 packages (i.e. names are the same)

I was recently bit by a feature (one might call it a bug) in Terraform. We wanted to try out the “Networks” feature in Hetzner Cloud but that required upgrading terraform-provider-hcloud, which in turn required upgrading Terraform to 0.12.x. For the most part migration from 0.11.x code to 0.12.x code was straightforward with some help from the automated migration tool. I even went as far as read some of the migration documentation, but missed one important part: connection blocks no longer have default values. To make the matter worse Terraform 0.12 does not error out if values are unset: instead if just runs the provisioner and then times out. This seems to be related to Terraform bug #21690.

Jenkins is a continuous integration (CI) / continuous delivery (CD) platform consisting of a Jenkins master - essentially a controller - which launches jobs on Jenkins slaves. Often slaves are controlled via SSH.

Recently I ran into an issue with a legacy Jenkins slave where the “jenkins” where Puppet tried to enforce the home directory of “jenkins” to be /home/jenkins instead of /var/lib/jenkins:

Error: Could not set home on user[jenkins]: Execution of '/usr/sbin/usermod -d /home/jenkins jenkins' returned 8: usermod: user jenkins is currently used by p rocess 802  

The usermod command failed because several Jenkins processes (ssh-agent, Java) locked the user from modification. The solution was relatively straightforward:

Importing classes is a two-phase process when you’re using r10k with Foreman. Say you’ve created a new class, “role::ipa_server” to the “production” environment; without Foreman it would be sufficient to deploy the change on the Puppetserver with r10k:

$ r10k deploy environment production -vp

At this point Foreman does not, however, know anything about this new class deployed with r10k:

$ hammer puppet-class list --environment production|grep ipa_server

The “Smart proxy” component in Foreman - also known as “foreman-proxy” - is responsible for fetching new classes from Puppetserver. With the latest Puppet versions it uses the Puppetserver API to do the import. It is fairly trivial to update Foreman’s list of classes using the command-line