[Rdo-list] Can't Deploy Foreman with openstack-foreman-installer for Bare Metal Provisioning (undefined method `[]' for nil:NilClass)

[Ramon Acedo]

Hi all,

I have been trying to test the OpenStack Foreman Installer with different combinations of Foreman versions and of the installer itself (and even different versions of Puppet) with no success so far. 

I know that Packstack alone works but I want to go all the way with multiple hosts and bare metal provisioning to eventually use it for large deployments and scale out Nova Compute and other services seamlessly.

The error I get when running the foreman_server.sh script is always:
--------------
 rake aborted!
 undefined method `[]' for nil:NilClass
  
 Tasks: TOP => db:seed
 (See full trace by running task with --trace)
--------------

After that, if Foreman starts, there’s nothing in the "Host groups" section which is supposed to be prepopulated by the foreman_server.sh script (as described in http://red.ht/1jdJ03q).

The process I follow is very simple:

1. Install a clean RHEL 6.5 or CentOS 6.5

2. Enable EPEL

3. Enable the rdo-release repo:

  a. rdo-release-havana-7: Foreman 1.3 and openstack-foreman-installer 1.0.6
  b. rdo-release-havana-8: Foreman 1.5 and openstack-foreman-installer 1.0.6
  c. rdo-release-icehouse-3: Foreman 1.5 and openstack-foreman-installer 2.0 (as a note here, the SCL repo needs to be enabled before the next step too).

4. Install openstack-foreman-installer

5. Create and export the needed variables:

   export PROVISIONING_INTERFACE=eth0
   export FOREMAN_GATEWAY=192.168.5.100
   export FOREMAN_PROVISIONING=true

6. Run the script foreman_server.sh from /usr/share/openstack-foreman-installer/bin

For 3a and 3b I also tried with an older version of Puppet (3.2) with the same result.

These are the full outputs:

3a: http://fpaste.org/97739/ (Havana and Foreman 1.3)
3b: http://fpaste.org/97760/ (Havana and Foreman 1.3 with Puppet 3.2)
3c: http://fpaste.org/97838/ (Icehouse and Foreman 1.5)

I’m sure somebody in the list has tried to deploy and configure Foreman for bare metal installations (DHCP+PXE) and the documentation and the foreman_server.sh script suggest it should be possible in a fairly easy way. 

I filled a bug as it might well be one, pending confirmation: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1092443

Any help is really appreciated!

Many thanks.

Ramon