This is the first edition of what I hope will continue as a monthly overview of events in and around the Foreman project, news from our plugin community and must-read articles or tips. Comments and suggestions are most welcome.
Foreman 1.3 release candidates out!
The first release candidates (RC) are out for the Foreman 1.3 release, only a few days behind the target quarterly schedule agreed at the roadmap meeting earlier this year.
Headline features include a new CLI (Hammer), new foreman-installer and many compute resource enhancements (EC2 VPC, association, GCE support).
Read the RC announcement or the 1.3 release notes for more information, and file feedback in Redmine.
Plugin community news
There are some exciting new plugins being created to extend Foreman’s capabilities. We feature three this month:
Clustered Foreman with foreman_memcache
For users running Foreman in a cluster configuration, foreman_memcache gives your instances a shared session and cache store. It’s seen an update to add a configuration file now and is now available in the plugins yum repo.
More information on the foreman_memcache project page.
Build ISOs with foreman_bootdisk
This plugin wraps up Foreman’s g/iPXE support into a user-friendly button to download ISO and USB images with fully static networking, so you only need DNS and connectivity to Foreman to boot new hosts. We’d like to expand support to host group images in the future.
More information on the foreman_bootdisk project page.
Tidying PuppetDB with puppetdb_foreman
PuppetDB stores exported data and catalogs from all of the hosts in your infrastructure, but when you delete a host in Foreman, that data lingers until it expires. Daniel Lobato’s plugin contacts PuppetDB when a host is deleted and triggers the tidyup immediately, the equivalent of puppet node deactivate.
More information on the puppetdb_foreman project page.
Getting plugins
All of the featured plugins above, and more, are available as RPMs in our repo at yum.theforeman.org/plugins.
The full known list and installation instructions are on the plugins wiki.
Recent talks
- +Marek Hulán shows the new kafo project built for the Foreman installer: Kafo deep dive
- +Greg Sutcliffe explains the work to remove the core Puppet dependency: Removing Puppet from core