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I want to know is there a way to manage hundreds of servers in foreman.

Let's say I have 100 machines. In each machine, OS is already installed and ssh is accessible.

Now I want to install a particular software through puppet in all these machine from foreman host. I don't want to login in each system and install puppet, configure ssl manually, etc stuff like that.

Can I do these configuration from host? without logging in each machine ??

Can I install puppet/puppet CA in all these machines from host??

I see provisioning in host. Could anyone guide me how to use Provisioning, for machines that has OS already installed in it??

Kenshin
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You take whatever method you currently use to manage hundreds of servers to enable and configure puppet on the servers and point it to the Foreman server. If you don't have such a way, you'll have no other option but to do it manually. If SSH is enabled, you might be able to script something with expect or something similar to make things easier. Also make sure to look into other config mangement systems, in particular Ansible.

Provisoning is a module to install the OS as a first management step.

Sven
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  • after installing os through provisioning, can we install puppet and cert signing from host itself ? – Kenshin Sep 26 '16 at 09:11
  • My question is, is there a way to connect to other predefined hosts from foreman ? script and other methods fine... but I am curious to know if there is any option in foreman to do this – Kenshin Sep 26 '16 at 09:14
  • Puppet will be enabled when you install an OS through Foreman (if you configure it, of course, you *could* use it as a deploy-only tool without Puppet, I believe) – Sven Sep 26 '16 at 09:14
  • I think my answer was quite clear: No, foreman offers no way to arbitrarily connect o hosts and enable puppet on them. This would be quite dangerous, don't you think? – Sven Sep 26 '16 at 09:15
  • Yes I understand the risk...but just curious to know the options available in foreman. I saw provisioning and thought this would be possible. So how does it install OS in other systems? It's like arbitrarily connecting and installing right ? – Kenshin Sep 26 '16 at 09:20
  • Provisioning (by default) works by setting up a PXE environment where you can boot your new system from to download and run the installer. For this to work, you have to configure the system in question to boot from the network and then power it on. Nothing about this is arbitrary - I've to decide to allow PXE boot and reboot my machine and the Foreman server can't control this. – Sven Sep 26 '16 at 09:24
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    There is no way around the following: If your environment is f*ed up enough that you really have no way to to semi-automatically configure your servers to use Puppet/Foreman, you have no other way then to do it manually. Rejoice though, as this will be the last time you need to do something like this. And again: Look into Ansible, it's an agent-less system that won't need this "activate and configure puppet-agent" step and might just be the better choice for you. – Sven Sep 26 '16 at 09:29
  • Okay I will take a look at Ansible. Thx – Kenshin Sep 26 '16 at 09:33