Red Hat Satellite 6 question

opethdisciple

opethdisciple

opethdisciple

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Does anyone have any experience with Red Hat Satellite 6.2?

I have it installed and I have been through all the documentation and know what I'm doing with regards to the GUI.

I've imported the manifest, setup the repos, keys, compute profiles, subnets etc etc ect...

I have DHCP, DNS, TFTP installed but for the life of me cant get a host to provision.

As we are just in the explore phase I'm just using the out the box provisioning templates. When I choose new host and try to provision, I see the host pop up on my vmhost (KVM) but I get no console in the GUI (websockets error) and I also cannot virsh console on to the new vm via the vmhost.

Now in my environment we don't use DHCP we use static IP's and we use the DC's for DNS.

I have installed the DNS, DHCP and TFTP services with the correct settings as per Red Hat's instructions here.

However my suspicion is that when I provision the vm from the satellite it is not PXE booting at all.

All iptables rules are set on the satellite server. The TFTP directory is there as well.

There must be some magic I am missing here. :confused:

Also the GUI, does not show the host doing any kind of PXE boot. Videos I have seen on you tube I can clearly see in the GUI more things happening than on my server.

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This is a RHEL 6 environment.

Do I have to install TFTP via yum on the KVM vmhost or something?
 
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Don't have a huge amount of time now and the suggestions I'm providing will be blind as I don't have a Foreman/Katello/Satellite 6 setup accessible to me, however:
  • Are you provisioning the virtual machine as if it were bare metal (i.e. creating the virtual machine manually on the VM host and configuring it to PXE boot) or are you using the libvirt package (https://theforeman.org/manuals/1.15/index.html#5.2ComputeResources)?
  • If you are creating the virtual machine manually, have you tried using virt-manager to view the display output of the virtual machine? That's where the output will be.
  • Have you configured the devices in the VM correctly? The bootstrap image may not have Virtio drivers etc. if you're using Virtio devices in the virtual machine. Using SCSI/SATA devices and e1000 may be your best bet.
Sorry I can't provide any more specific suggestions right now, and may not be able to in the future as I don't have access to any Satellite installations (unless I also spin one up in a VM!).
 
lamboman said:
Don't have a huge amount of time now and the suggestions I'm providing will be blind as I don't have a Foreman/Katello/Satellite 6 setup accessible to me, however:
  • Are you provisioning the virtual machine as if it were bare metal (i.e. creating the virtual machine manually on the VM host and configuring it to PXE boot) or are you using the libvirt package (https://theforeman.org/manuals/1.15/index.html#5.2ComputeResources)?
  • If you are creating the virtual machine manually, have you tried using virt-manager to view the display output of the virtual machine? That's where the output will be.
  • Have you configured the devices in the VM correctly? The bootstrap image may not have Virtio drivers etc. if you're using Virtio devices in the virtual machine. Using SCSI/SATA devices and e1000 may be your best bet.
Sorry I can't provide any more specific suggestions right now, and may not be able to in the future as I don't have access to any Satellite installations (unless I also spin one up in a VM!).
Click to expand...

Any suggestions are welcome.

I'm not useing bare metal. I have set up a libvrt compute resource within satellite and trying deploy from that. It works as I can see the existing VM's from within the satellite. I assumed the host would attempt to pxe boot from the satellite.

It's just that nothing happens when I create a new host from the satellite. Today I had tftp opened up on the cisco asa so thats a bit of progress but still nothing is happening.

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Ill try your second suggest to use virt manager. I'm only familiar with virt console tho. we are using RHEL 6 however. I dont think the virt-manager is installed on this machines. We are currently using cobbler to kickstart installations it's all cmd line.

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As for the 3rd part... about configuring the devices I have no idea. Probably not. I have followed the RH Satellite guide from start to finish and there is no chapter in there about setting up the devices. I'll try to switch to using SCSI/SATA devices and e1000.

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The RH documentation is not very good on this. Lots of stuff is left unsaid and just assumed.
 
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Just to be clear, virt-manager is also known as Virtual Machine Manager, the GUI you'd usually use to manage libvirt. I'd use virt-manager to view the display (via SPICE) of the virtual machine to see what it is doing, as well as look at the VM devices. You may need to create a new bootstrap image (though I'd have guessed this wouldn't be the case). As I said before, this is mostly guesswork off the top of my head so this all may not be the case.

We also had issues with DHCP and TFTP when dealing with Satellite, where you'd need to remove the references to a particular machine (MAC) from the ISC DHCP and TFTP configuration files and restart the services (I think, you may need to play around with this if this is indeed the issue).

I've not played with Satellite in over a year, however have you considered using Foreman (upstream of Satellite) instead? The documentation does appear to be better.
 
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I made a little bit of progress. I found this guide and it seems (I think) there where one or two things missing from my iptables rules that where missing and now I have the web console working!

However.... no joy getting pxe boot to work, but I think I am close.

It's something related to DNS and DHCP that's my issue.

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So, I'm fairly sure now I have done most things correctly. My issue is related to DHCP (which then has a knock on effect with networking) We use static IP's so no DHCP server on the network.

Even tho during host creation I specify IP address, I imagine it is not being applied, so the host doesn't have an ip and thus cant PXE boot.

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I found this so will give it a shot.
 
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I think I am slowly making progress on this. However my next question is related to the PXE boot process and DHCP.

We do not have a DHCP server running our my environment. However I gather from the RH documentation that the PXE procedure relies on DHCP to match mac to IP during provisioning.

Do I need to set up a new DHCP server or is it possible to get this to work using static IP's?

Thanks
 
The satellite has the dhcp service installed and the service is running.

When I come to provision host tho (I've set everything up in the subnet) it doesn't auto suggest an IP.

Also I understand in order to get PXE to work I need to provide a mac address for the host. But how do I know that before the host has been provisioned?

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Red Hat are really frustrating me this week. I've asked them at least 5 times to contact me they keep saying they will but never do. I don't even know if I MUST use DHCP and dynamic IP's as in my environment we use static. I can find stuff on the internet about using static IP's and not DHCP, but still struggling to get it to work.

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It's two weeks I've been working on this. The issue is that there are so many different ways to do things I go off in one direction only to learn something else, then don't know if I should carry on this path or try something else.

For example you can set this up to us PXE boot or PXE less discovery. In my scenario we don't have DHCP servers. And it's a secure environment. Technically the tftp ports I've had opened on our Cisco ASA are a security risk.

But then that means me switching towards a PXE less discovery method. Already spent two weeks trying to get PXE to work. Videos on you tube make it look easy. But they skip the part I'm stuck on. See I've set everything up on the satellite and can press the button to provision hosts. But the bit missing is in between the provision host and seeing the boot process in a console. Nothing happens.

Red Hat are frustrating me. I've been asking them for a week to call me. They called once and droped the call when they they got to the automated reception message for my company. All they had to do was put in my extension which I provided them in the instructions. :rolleyes:
 
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Here's the scenario.

Satellite server is on subnet A, clinets are on subnet B.

DHCP wont work because Satellite server is on a different subnet to clients?

For this to work, I need a DHCP server in each subnet also pointing towards the satellite for pxe boot?

Problem is ideally we dont want dhcp at all as we have a 100% static IP environment so I need to look at PXE less discovery?
 
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IP helper for subnet B to point at DHCP server in subnet A.

Just set up static reservations for IPs in DHCP and configure PXE there, this is what we do for all of our statics.
 
Sp00n said:
IP helper for subnet B to point at DHCP server in subnet A.

Just set up static reservations for IPs in DHCP and configure PXE there, this is what we do for all of our statics.
Click to expand...

Interesting. Is the IP helper something on the router level? I googled it and it seems to be something we can set on the Cisco ASA.

We actually have more than just one subnet with clients. I do know that you can set the subnets in /etc/foreman-proxy/settings.d/dhcp.yml so presumably the satellite server would be able to hand out ip addresses for servers on different subnets not just one.

But I'm actually thinking that PXE less discovery might be what we want as even if we use DHCP, we ideally want to set static IP's on the servers.

Which do you think I should pursue?
 
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IP Helper, DHCP Helper etc... will need to be set up on your gateway level, so if you have multiple subnets, one assumes that you have multiple gateways and VLANs so you would set up the IP helper address at the gateway (router/firewall) to forward dhcp requests from the subnet to the dhcp server. The DHCP server serves up the appropriate DHCP range based on the gateway address or reservation.

If you have hardware in place to achieve that then I would say go with that, it's very straight forward.

PXE-less discovery seems to just require you boot off of a discovery ISO, few more hoops to jump through but could suit if you don't have full control over the network.
 
Sp00n said:
IP Helper, DHCP Helper etc... will need to be set up on your gateway level, so if you have multiple subnets, one assumes that you have multiple gateways and VLANs so you would set up the IP helper address at the gateway (router/firewall) to forward dhcp requests from the subnet to the dhcp server. The DHCP server serves up the appropriate DHCP range based on the gateway address or reservation.

If you have hardware in place to achieve that then I would say go with that, it's very straight forward.

PXE-less discovery seems to just require you boot off of a discovery ISO, few more hoops to jump through but could suit if you don't have full control over the network.
Click to expand...

Thanks you where right about needing a relay.

I moved a step forward. I sort of got DHCP working... or at least it offers me IP's within the range I specified.

However getting various issues. It complains at provisioning time about not being able to create DHCP reservations.

Create DHCP Settings for testvm5.test.web.local task failed with the following error: ERF12-6899 [ProxyAPI:proxyException]: Unable to set DHCP entry ([RestClient::BadRequest]: 400 Bad Request)

I also get errors with it saying that my reverse DNS isn't working. I read online you can disable this so I did.

Looking at the Red Hat documentation I'm confused about capsules and the satellite it's self. In the documentation they make a distinction between a capsule and the satellite. In my deployment the satellite is the capsule as well. so when I configure DNS,DHCP etc I imagine I am setting it up using the 'satellite' deployment method?

Red Hat are useless. Two weeks in and still no support.

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LOL the :p is actually : P with out the space.
 
Finally getting a PXE boot!!

My next issue is when I PXE boot my test vm it hangs at the retrieving screen for a bit then I get a message that it cant find the kickstart file. My current set up is a plain vanilla out of the box configuration of Satellite 6. I don't think I have configured a custom kickstart file yet. I am using the default out of the box templates. Do I I have to create my own kickstart file?
 
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