Foreman 1.13 released
Foreman 1.13 was officially released on October 6th, bringing support for IPv6, UEFI and GRUB2 bootloader support, performance improvements to the DHCP proxy, multiple Compute resource upgrades, support for structured facts, and much more. For more information, see the headline features, and the announcement
The first bugfix release, 1.13.1 is also now available, bringing over 30 fixes to the 1.13 series, so please do upgrade. You can find more details in the announcement.
As ever, please do report any bugs you find - your input is what makes Foreman’s reputation for quality possible. Thanks!
Foreman 1.12.4 released
Foreman 1.12.4 has also been released, bringing a small number of bug fixes around searching and the dashboard - see the announcement for details.
This is likely to be the last 1.12.x release, so it’s time to start planning the migration to 1.13.
EL6 removed in 1.13, unofficial builds available
EL6 was dropped by the core Foreman project for 1.13. However, the Katello team have produced a set of unofficial EL6 packages which can be obtained from their repos. If you’re on 1.12 (or earlier) and EL6 and would like to use these packages, see the announcement.
EL6 users are strongly encouraged to consider migrating to EL7, as this is very likely to be the last release (official or unofficial) with EL6 support. Discussions about the best strategies for migration are happening on the mailing list - please do join in the discussion if this is of interest to you, or you have experience to share!
Note that installation of EL6 hosts from Foreman is still supported - it’s the packages for Foreman itself that will no longer be produced for EL6.
Katello 3.2 RC3
Katello 3.2 RC3 was released a couple of days ago, bringing further fixes and EL6 packages to the RC series. You can find out more from the announcement - and as ever, your testing is hugely appreciated. If you’d like to try it out, let us know how it goes. Thanks!
Discovery 7.0.0 and Image 3.2.0
A new milestone has been reached in the Discovery project, bringing support for
UEFI, PXE-less booting on Debian/Ubuntu and a sizeable number of bugfixes.
Accompanying it is the Discovery Image 3.2.0 release, with the addition of
biosdevname to support Dell NICs and initial support for VLANs. More detail
is available on the announcement.
Meet ups
New meet ups in California and Washington DC
Ashton Davies (California) and Chris Pisano (Washington DC) are both trying to start up Foreman meet up groups in their local area. If you’d like to join in, you can go to the SoCal and DMV threads on the mailing list.
If you’d like to start up a meet up of your own and aren’t sure how, drop me a line
Foreman @ PuppetConf 2016 Meet up
A very hastily organised meetup was held at PuppetConf on Wed 19th 2016, and was deemed a big success. There were about 20 people present, with a good mix of experienced and new users swapping stories and tips. My thanks to Ashton and Chris for their help in organising it!
New media and blogs
Deep Dive on Host Facets, with Shimon Shtein
If you’re working on plugins, you want to watch this. Shimon gave an excellent introduction to Host Facets, the idea behind them, how to use them, and a good discussion on what they’re good at (and not good at!). Check it out.
Community Demo - 13th October
Once again we had a busy demo, with many updates from the Katello project around packages and content views. We also had some Hammer updates and a look at the new charting libraries being brought into core.
Of particular note was Justin’s coverage of the recent set of Katello RFCs which aim to start bring Katello in line with other Foreman plugins. If this is of interest to you, you can jump directly to that part of the video here.
Foreman High-Availability blog series - Martin Dobrev
Martin (mdobrev in IRC) has done an in-depth series of posts on his experiences of setting up Foreman in a highly-available way. This is a great resource if you’re looking into HA yourself, so take a look!
Katello 3.2 / Puppet 4 integration
You’ve probably seen this already (since it’s on the same blog as this newsletter!) but it’s worth highlighting again. Zach has done a great job of writing up the Puppet 4 changes in Katello 3.2.
Upcoming events
Deep Dive on React, JS, and UI, with Ohad Levy & Gail Steiger
In this episode of the Deep Dive series, Ohad and Gail will be talking about the recent JavaScript changes in Foreman. We will have a very basic introduction to ReactJS and how it is currently used in Foreman, as well as a wider discussion about the Foreman UI and where it could be heading.
Come to this deep dive if you are interested in:
- UX improvement in Foreman
- JavaScript / client side future of Foreman
- understanding, what React is
Community Demo - 3rd November
The next community demo will be on 3rd November, and as ever you’re warmly welcomed to join us live for an hour of discussion on the latest work done in the Foreman community. See you then!
CfgMgmtCamp Berlin - 15th November
If you love Config Management Camp in Ghent, but just can’t wait until February, then you’ll want to check out the one day event being organised in Berlin. Registration is still open, so book in, and the schedule looks great!
DevConf.cz / FOSDEM / CfgMgmtCamp Ghent - February 2017
The big Foreman conference season approaches again! For brevity, I’ll just link to the mailing list posts about these - but do note the CFPs are open and we want your submissions!
(All Foreman events are now available via the Foreman Calendar)
Updated plugins
New plugins this month:
Updated plugins:
- foreman_ansible updated to 1.2.1
- foreman_azure updated to 1.0.2
- foreman_column_view updated to 0.3.0
- foreman_digitalocean updated to 1.1
- foreman_expire_hosts updated to 2.1.1
- foreman_openscap updated to 0.6.3
- foreman_templates updated to 3.1.0
-
puppetdb_foreman updated to 1.0.4
- smart_proxy_salt updated to 2.1.7
- smart_proxy_ansible now packaged
Acknowledgements
Thanks to everyone who contributes to the Foreman community - patches, plugins, testing, bug reports, translations, interviews, presentations, meet ups and everything else. Your efforts are very much appreciated!