How To Install & Configure Katello on CentOS

This tutorial shows you how to install and configure Katello on CentOS.

What is Katello?

Katello is a system lifecycle management plugin for Foreman, and it’s good that we all know what Foreman is. Foreman is a complete lifecycle management tool for servers both physically and virtually.

Katello allows us to manage thousands of machines with a single click dynamically.

Katello can extract content from remote repositories in isolated environments and make subscription management easy by further increasing productivity and resource use within the organization.

Set Hostname in CentOS

The first step is to rename the host with the following syntax:

hostnamectl set-hostname katello.(nombre).local

In case of not having a DNS server in our system, it will be necessary to update the file /etc/hosts with the previously assigned name in the following way:

echo "192.168.0.7 katello.solvetic.local solvetic" >> /etc/hosts

Note: In the IP address we must attribute the one that the system currently has.

Firewall Settings for Katello

Once the hostname is defined, the next step is to set the firewall rules for Katello to enable the ports.

There we will execute the following line:

firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-port=80/tcp --add-port=443/tcp --add-port=5647/tcp --add-port=9090/tcp

Now we will add the permission for the intelligent proxy by running the following:

firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-port=8140/tcp --add-port=8443/tcp --add-port=8000/tcp --add-port=67/udp --add-port=68/udp --add-port=69/udp

Restart the firewall service by executing the following:

firewall-cmd –reload

Configure NTP Server

The next step is to configure the NTP server so that the server can synchronize with the NTP time server correctly. For this, we will execute the following lines.

First of all, we install NTP:

yum install -y ntp

Restart the NTP service:

service ntpd restart

Finally, we execute the following lines:

timedatectl set-timezone Europe/Madrid
ntpdate -u es.pool.ntp.org

Note: To check the time zone together with the NTP server, we can go to the official NTP link and locate the desired geographical area:

http://www.pool.ntp.org/zone/

Install Official Katello Repositories

The next step is to install the Katello repositories which are required for its operation.

It will be necessary to execute the following lines:

yum -y localinstall http://fedorapeople.org/groups/katello/releases/yum/3.2/katello/el7/x86_64/katello-repos-latest.rpm

yum -y localinstall http://yum.theforeman.org/releases/1.13/el7/x86_64/foreman-release.rpm

yum -y localinstall http://yum.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs-release-el-7.noarch.rpm

yum -y localinstall http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm

yum -y install foreman-release-scl

We proceed to update the packages again running

yum -y update

Install & Use Katello in CentOS 7

With the installed repositories the next step will be to install the Katello packages, and for this, we execute the following:

yum -y install katello

There we must wait for all the packages to be downloaded and installed in the system, this process can take between 20 to 30 minutes.

Now we will configure Katello using Foreman, and we have two options. The first option is to set the user and password to access Katello on a single line:

foreman-installer --scenario katello --foreman-admin-username admin --foreman-admin-password <password>

The second option is to execute the following line and there take note of the details of the account.

foreman-installer --scenario katello

Finally, to access Katello, we must go to the browser and enter the following:

http://IP-Address

There we will access with the credentials defined above. When accessing this will be the environment. There we can start the entire configuration and management process.