Welcome back to the Foreman Newsletter - we hope you’ve had a good month! It’s certainly been busy in the Foreman community, so let’s get started…
1.12 RC1 and RC2 released
The next stable release of Foreman (1.12) has entered release candidate stage, and we’re already up to RC2! As ever, we greatly value your testing. This release comes with the long-awaited Puppet 4 support, and packaging for the latest Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) OS. These are both new elements, and your feedback and bug reports (if any!) are welcome.
As ever, you can check out the details on the mailing list post and in the hedline features. Thanks to all who contributed bug reports and patches!
1.11.3 bugfix released
The next release in the current stable release series (1.11.3) is out now, and contains a fix for CVE-2016-4451, as well as many other fixes. See the announcement for more details.
Foreman’s 7th Birthday - celebrations planned!
On July 13th, Foreman will be 7 years old! Since this coincides rather nicely with the 1.12 release (and the Puppet 4 support) I’m currently organising a series of events around our various geographical centres to mark the occasion. So far, I have events planned (but not 100% confirmed) for East-coast US, UK, Germany, and Israel. There’ll be meetups, install days, talks and swag to be had! Watch Twitter or the events page to know whats confirmed!
If you want to be involved in organising this effort, please contact me and I’ll work something out with you
- thanks!
Katello 3.0 (Saison) and 3.0.1 bugfix released
The latest version of the Katello plugin hit its milestone 3.0 release this month, after an extended RC phase - thanks again to all who contributed to the testing of the various RCs! The list of changes is large, so I’ll just direct you to the release announcement for the details. Unfortunately, one bug did creep though, so this was followed up with a swift 3.0.1 release which deals with the issue. Please do keep reporting any further issues.
As the announcement states, this is a huge change to Katello, and upgrades require some planning - users are encouraged to read through the steps and take appropriate backups before upgrading. Do get in touch on IRC or the mailing lists if you have any questions!
SSL comes to theforeman.org (and yum. & deb. too)
Thanks to the hard work of the infra team, our website and packaging repos now have LetsEncrypt SSL certificates in place. This has the main benefit of allowing secure downloads of our packaging GPG keys for verification of the packages themselves.
The quickstart guides have been updated to reflect the updated URL scheme.
New media and blogs
Community Demo on 19th May 2016
On this episode of the Foreman Community Demo, we cast a wide net to pull in updates from Pulp (the project that handles content for Katello), from Katello, from our CLI testers, and some Infoblox DNS/DHCP providers for the Smart Proxy. There’s also a quick look at the 1.11.2 release, and a teaser for the upcoming Puppet 4 support!
Community Demo on 9th June 2016
On this episode of the Foreman Community Demo, we had a look at upcoming tools for flexible data exports, a new admin plugin for Hammer, some email styling help, new collections for Settings, and a new lock-in feature for Discovery. Oh, and 1.12.0 RC1 :)
Foreman Deep Dives: SQL Debugging for Beginners
Chris Duryee (beav on IRC) joined us for this Deep Dive, in which he gave us an in-depth look into SQL debugging. If you’ve ever wanted to know why certain pages are slow to load, this is one to watch!
Case Study on Infoblox and Infra Integration with Matt Nicholson
For this case study, we talked with Matt Nicholson (@sjoeboo), author of the smart-proxy-{dhcp,dns}-infoblox plugins) about his use of Foreman at Harvard University Medical School, how he went about implementing the Infoblox plugins, and wider thoughts on extending Foreman in general.
Satellite 6.2 Beta 2 released
For those following the downstream releases as well as upstream ones, Satellite 6.2 Beta 2 is now available for download.
Upcoming events
Foreman San Francisco Meetup
Tues 28th June - Local meetup for folks in the San Francisco area, along with those visiting for DevNation or Red Hat Summit. Come along and have a chat with other Foreman users and some of the devs!
Community Demo on 7th July 2016
The next Foreman Community Demo will be on Thursday 7th July. As ever, you can watch live and participate via the Q&A app or via IRC, or you can catch up later on YouTube and ask questions in the mailing list thread.
(All Foreman events are now available via the Foreman Calendar)
New plugins
- foreman_azure - New plugin adding Azure as a Compute Resource - see the release thread for details.
Updated plugins
- foreman_bootdisk updated to 8.0.1
- foreman_salt updated to 5.0.1
- foreman_setup updated to 3.1.1
- hammer-cli & foreman updated to 0.7.0
- foreman_expire_hosts updated to 2.0.1
- foreman_openscap & proxy updated to 0.5.4
Acknowledgements
Thanks to everyone who contributes to the Foreman community - patches, plugins, testing, bug reports, translations, interviews, presentations, and everything else. Your efforts are very much appreciated!