Windows – How to get Run Puppet button working on Foreman

I tried a number of ways to get kick running reliably but couldn't and it's deprecated anyway so I moved on to puppetssh. That required configuring smart-proxy's SSH keys, the foreman-proxy user and its sudo rights. There isn't a lot of documentation on this puppet run method and the DEBUG logging in foreman-proxy doesn't include any command output so it was hard to tell where/how something was failing.

By default, the foreman-proxy user doesn't have a shell (on RHEL) and wouldn't be able to run /usr/bin/ssh. A simple usermod -s /bin/bash did the trick but that seems like a security risk to me. On top of that, different sudo rights are necessary to run it so I had to change foreman-proxy ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/puppet kick to foreman-proxy ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/ssh. After that it was just a matter of configuring the ssh command.

In my case, we deployed a user account and SSH keys for running Puppet commands with sudo on client machines. I copied the private key to some place foreman-proxy could use it (eg: /etc/foreman-proxy/puppetssh/id_rsa) and configured the puppetssh parameters in /etc/foreman-proxy/settings.yml like so:

:puppetssh_command: /usr/bin/sudo /usr/bin/puppet agent -t --no-usecacheonfailure
:puppetssh_user: puppetssh
:puppetssh_keyfile: /etc/foreman-proxy/puppetssh/id_rsa

If this is still a problem I've found that following along with the Foreman installation guide is very confusing. Both your dns and dhcp keys need to be the same, whereas in the installation guide it shows two different ways to configure keys between dns and dhcp.

This is what finally worked for me: run: ddns-confgen -k foreman -a hmac-md5

This produces output that looks like this:

 key "foreman" {
         algorithm hmac-md5;
         secret "GGd1oNCxaKsh8HA84sP1Ug=="; };

Put this block of text into /etc/rndc.key

Now you have to update your daemon configurations:
/etc/named.conf
/etc/zones.conf
/etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf

/etc/named.conf:
Add:

include "/etc/rndc.key";
controls  {
        inet 127.0.0.1 port 953 allow { 127.0.0.1; } keys { "foreman"; };
};

This tells BIND to read the key named "foreman" out of /etc/rndc.key and allow the key named "foreman" to connect to the control port on 953 to do ddns updates.

Now, In /etc/zones.conf, this is from my example, I am using ".local" as my domain and 172.16.1.0/24 as my network. Adjust accordingly.

zone "1.16.172.in-addr.arpa" {
    type master;
    file "/var/named/dynamic/db.1.16.172.in-addr.arpa";
    update-policy {
            grant foreman zonesub ANY;
    };
};
zone "local" {
    type master;
    file "/var/named/dynamic/db.local";
    update-policy {
            grant foreman zonesub ANY;
    };
};

The important part is:

update-policy {
                grant foreman zonesub ANY;
        };

This is telling BIND that the key foreman is allowed to update/add any of the records in these zones.

Finally, and this is what messed me up because the install guide uses a different syntax for the DHCP server: /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf Add:

omapi-port 7911;
key foreman {
algorithm HMAC-MD5;
secret "GGd1oNCxaKsh8HA84sP1Ug==";
};
omapi-key foreman;

Now you moved on to the foreman-proxy config files:
/etc/foreman-proxy/settings.d/dns.yml
/etc/foreman-proxy/settings.d/dhcp.yml

Contents of: /etc/foreman-proxy/settings.d/dns.yml

---
# DNS management
:enabled: true

# valid providers:
#   dnscmd (Microsoft Windows native implementation)
#   nsupdate
#   nsupdate_gss (for GSS-TSIG support)
#   virsh (simple implementation for libvirt)

:dns_provider: nsupdate
:dns_key: /etc/rndc.key

# use this setting if you are managing a dns server which is not localhost though this proxy
:dns_server: 127.0.0.1
# use this setting if you want to override default TTL setting (86400)
:dns_ttl: 86400

Contents of: /etc/foreman-proxy/settings.d/dhcp.yml

---
# Enable DHCP management
:enabled: true
# valid vendors:
#   - isc
#   - native_ms (Microsoft native implementation)
#   - virsh (simple implementation for libvirt)
:dhcp_vendor: isc
:dhcp_config: /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf
:dhcp_leases: /var/lib/dhcpd/dhcpd.leases
:dhcp_key_name: foreman
:dhcp_key_secret: GGd1oNCxaKsh8HA84sP1Ug==

For whatever reason having both configured with different keys kept causing problems for me. This finally fixed it. Hope that helps.

Oh and as an FYI those files /etc/rndc.key, /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf, /var/lib/dhcpd/dhcpd.leases need to be readable by foreman-proxy, I accomplished this by adding foreman-proxy to the dhcp and named groups:

usermod -a -G dhcpd foreman-proxy
usermod -a -G named foreman-proxy

ls -l /etc/named.conf /etc/zones.conf /etc/rndc.key /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf /var/lib/dhcpd/dhcpd.leases
-rw-r--r--. 1 root  root   787 Apr 10 14:56 /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf
-rw-r-----. 1 root  named  275 Apr 10 14:45 /etc/named.conf
-rw-r-----. 1 root  named   77 Apr 10 14:41 /etc/rndc.key
-rw-r-----. 1 root  named  316 Apr 10 12:40 /etc/zones.conf
-rw-r--r--. 1 dhcpd dhcpd 1262 Apr 10 15:00 /var/lib/dhcpd/dhcpd.leases

id foreman-proxy
uid=498(foreman-proxy) gid=497(foreman-proxy) groups=497(foreman-proxy),52(puppet),177(dhcpd),25(named)