Foreman

Hi All,

This is a maintenance release, and most likely the last release of foreman supporting Ruby older than 1.87 (The proxy would still run on older versions of ruby as far as we can support it).

if you have no idea what foreman is about, feel free to review http://theforeman.org/projects/foreman/wiki/Features

This release mostly contains many small UI fixes and features, PostgreSQL related bugs and dashboard notifications.

If you are provisioning hosts via foreman, it is highly recommended to upgrade to this version, as it solves an issue when foreman was unable to rollback actions on failures #1386 [1] (e.g. dns / dhcp records etc).

The complete change log for foreman can be found here [2] and for the proxy at [3]

[1] - http://theforeman.org/issues/1386
[2] - http://theforeman.org/versions/show/17
[3] - http://theforeman.org/versions/show/18

Many thanks to all contributes and users,

Have fun,
Ohad

So, its been a long time, and finally we got a new foreman release :)

Download - http://theforeman.org/foreman-latest.tar.bz2
RPMS http://yum.theforeman.org
DEB - http://deb.theforeman.org

Some of this version highlights:¶

• New UI that doesn't SUCK.
• host groups can now be nested
• hostgroups can now act as a as templates, including VM attributes etc.
• Introducing Smart Variables
• Most of Foreman_configuration has been moved into the UI itself, this does not require a restart every time you change something, only core settings remain in the settings file.
• audit log now capture class assignments
• Solaris (sparc and intel) provisioning support
• OpenSUSE provisioning support
• BMC NIC management
• Introducing Foreman CLI
• Many API improvements
• added rundeck integration
• dhcp subnets can now be imported via the proxy

Smart Proxy version¶

In order to use provisioning support with this version of Foreman, you
are required to* update your proxy* to the latest 0.3 release.

Ruby 1.87 support¶

Foreman 0.4 would be the last major version supporting Ruby older then 1.87.
This has to be done since the upstream rails community no longer supports older versions, which means that critical security patches are no longer available if we keep supporting that.

if required, we would release 0.4.x maintenance releases, but since ruby 1.87+ is available on most distribution these days, you are encouraged to upgrade.

All in all, this version has around 180 features/bugs fixed, so its our largest so far - full details at [1]

Full release notes [2]

We've also added another means of communications (besides IRC and mailing lists, Google+ page [3])

I would like to thank anyone who contributed to the project, I'm having lots of fun :-)

Ohad

[1] - http://theforeman.org/versions/show/13
[2] - http://theforeman.org/projects/foreman/wiki/ReleaseNotes
[3] - https://plus.google.com/102496134326414788199/

I'm pleased to announce the release of Foreman 0.3

Download from:

Source: http://theforeman.org/attachments/download/237/foreman-0.3.tar.bz2
RPM: http://yum.theforeman.org/stable/RPMS/foreman-0.3-1.noarch.rpm

It is recommended to upgrade your foreman smart proxy to the latest version as well.

Highlights of this release include:

Searching¶

• Foreman now has a searchbar that prompts for possible search fields and values.
• Searches can consist of multiple clauses with complex logic operations.
• Previous searches can be saved as a bookmark and made public for others to use.
• Many more search conditions, among them:
  • Host can be found by their parameters
  • Host can be found by their classes (direct associations or though host groups).
  • Host can be found by all valid combinations (e.g. multiple facts, report status, time stamps etc)
• Audits search target have been greatly enhanced
• All Search conditions could be used via the API as well
• Search can apply on pages such as the dashboard (e.g. show only hosts in environment != development)
• Example of a puppet function which uses the search API can found here: https://gist.github.com/919578

Authorization¶

• A user is always granted access to their own account information. This also allows Internal users to change their password even if they do not have edit rights on User.
• Additional permission groups have been added to control access to nearly all of Foreman's feature.

Charting¶

• The graphing libraries have been replaced with the Highchart system.
• Internet access is no longer required to view charts.
• They look way better :p

Virtualization¶

• The hypervisor pages now show more information about their guests.
• Virtual clients can now be deleted/stopped/started etc.

Smart-proxy extensions¶

• Puppet certificates can now be displayed, signed and revoked from within Foreman.
• Autosign entries can be managed from within Foreman.

API¶

Many more operations that are available from the Web interface have been exposed via the API. These are just a few:-

• Classes per host
• Host's last report
• Statistics can be retrieved
• Complex search queries could be performed via the API as well using the same search syntax as in the UI

Information for developers¶

• The Backend Prototype Javascript library has been replaced with jQuery, thus providing a much richer set of graphical browser components

Misc.¶

• All communication between smart-proxies and Foreman could be encrypted over HTTPS channels.
• Support for Scientific Linux has been added.
• Most operations now refer to the host by its name rather than its id in the URL.
• Selected hosts tickbox works across multiple pages.
• Foreman handles unreachable proxies gracefully.
• Hosts which report skipped operations are no longer considered as being in error state.
• When creating or editing a host the provisioning templates that will be used are displayed.

The complete changes list can be found here: http://theforeman.org/versions/show/4

As Usual, many thanks to all contributors and users!!!

Have fun,
Ohad

Prior of releasing foreman 0.3 shortly, a new release of foreman smart proxy is due:

This is primarily a bug-fix release but there are some limited changes in functionality.

PuppetCA

• An API for Puppet Certificate listing and signing is provided.
• An API for Autosign editing is provided.
• Puppet Certificate revocation is handled properly.

TFTP

• A host's tftp server is retrieved from the host's DHCP smart-proxy.
• Added support for different variants of the PXE boot process. This release can support Solaris PXEGrub manipulation.
• Boot file downloading is more robust.

DHCP

• Access to the DHCP server via omshell uses the secret key facility.
• Microsoft 64bit detection was fixed.

General

• Better support for older ruby versions.
• Debian packaging has been revised.
• rake now supports a target mail_patches that automates developer's patch generation and submission to the foreman-dev group.
• Runs the smart-proxy process under the smart-proxy account and group.
• The smart-proxy API provides a Version call.
• Better error messages throughout.
• Smart-proxy return NOTFOUND errors when a resource is missing. This kind of failure is then handled correctly, in Foreman.

Download

Source: http://theforeman.org/attachments/download/236/foreman-proxy-0.2.tar.bz2

RPM: usual place (yum.theforeman.org/stable)

Full bug list, see here: http://theforeman.org/versions/show/11

Many thanks to all contributors and users

Hello All,

I'm happy to announce a new release of Foreman, top highlights for this release includes:

• New look and feel
• Extended restful API
• Support for New Puppet Reports format
• Full VM/physical host Provisioning
• Powerful template generator ( pxelinux, gpxe, kickstart, preseed, grub etc..)
• introduce a new service called smart proxy (which can run on remote machines) to manage the following services:
  • DNS Management
  • DHCP Management
  • TFTP Management
  • Puppet/PuppetCA Management

This release is a major release packed with goodies, more than 130 tickets were closed.

Release notes can be found here: http://theforeman.org/projects/foreman/wiki/ReleaseNotes

Full change log can be found here: http://theforeman.org/versions/show/9

As usually many many thanks to all contributors and users

RPMS for both smart proxy and foreman can be found at http://yum.theforeman.org/stable

Have fun,
Ohad

I'm happy to announce the release of project called Foreman smart proxy.

The proxy aim is to expose restful API's around infrastructure services such as (DNS, DHCP, TFTP, Puppet, PuppetCA etc).

This allows foreman (and other projects) to have a simple restful API to perform modifications on such remote systems - such as create dhcp reservations, suggest ip addresses, sign puppet certificates, setup boot servers etc etc.

The proxy runs on both Linux and Windows, helping people who depend on different set of infrastructure services.

A new release of Foreman is just around the corner, where we utilize the smart proxy to allow complete provisioning in large scale environments (i.e. many subnets, many DC's, many puppet masters and many foreman proxies etc).

Hi All,

There would be a talk about Foreman at this upcoming FOSDEM 2011 presented by self, hope to meet many of you guys there!

btw: a lot of exciting new features are underway.. more info soon :)

Ohad

For those of you who think that Foreman development has slowed down a bit, you are probably right....

• I started a new job last week.
• I moved a country.
• I didn't have more than 10" display for a month and a half.

But not to worry, I'll be up to speed in no time (ok.. Maybe a few more weeks :))

Keep on the bugs / feature requests coming, we'll cut out a new version soon.

Thanks,
Ohad

New Foreman Release - checkout the Release Notes at http://theforeman.org/projects/foreman/wiki/ReleaseNotes

Have fun!
Ohad