Upgrading Foreman to nightly

Upgrade Foreman server to nightly. For more information, see Foreman server upgrade considerations.

Upgrade all Smart Proxy servers to nightly. For more information, see Upgrading Smart Proxy servers.

If you want to have several smaller outage windows instead of one larger window.

If Smart Proxies in your organization are managed by several teams and are located in different locations.

Stop all Foreman services:

# foreman-maintain service stop

Take a snapshot or create a backup:

Start all Foreman services:

# foreman-maintain service start

Optional: If you made manual edits to DNS or DHCP configuration in the /etc/zones.conf or /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf files, back up the configuration files because the installer only supports one domain or subnet, and therefore restoring changes from these backups might be required.

Optional: If you made manual edits to DNS or DHCP configuration files and do not want to overwrite the changes, enter the following command:

# foreman-installer \
--foreman-proxy-dhcp-managed=false \
--foreman-proxy-dns-managed=false

In the Foreman web UI, navigate to Hosts > Discovered hosts. On the Discovered Hosts page, power off and then delete the discovered hosts. From the Select an Organization menu, select each organization in turn and repeat the process to power off and delete the discovered hosts. Make a note to reboot these hosts when the upgrade is complete.

Update operating system packages:

# dnf upgrade

Update repositories:

On Enterprise Linux 8: Switch to the PostgreSQL 13 module:

# dnf -y module switch-to postgresql:13

If you are using an external database, upgrade your database to PostgreSQL 13.

On Enterprise Linux 8: Ensure the module streams are enabled:

# dnf module enable foreman:el8

Stop all services:

# foreman-maintain service stop

Update the required packages:

# dnf upgrade

Run the installer:

# foreman-installer

Determine if the system needs a reboot:

# dnf needs-restarting --reboothint

If the previous command told you to reboot, then reboot the system:

# reboot

Create a backup.

Update repositories:

On Enterprise Linux 8: Ensure the module streams are enabled:

# dnf module enable foreman:el8

Update the required packages:

# dnf upgrade

Run the installer:

# foreman-installer

Determine if the system needs a reboot:

# dnf needs-restarting --reboothint

If the previous command told you to reboot, then reboot the system:

# reboot

Optional: If you made manual edits to DNS or DHCP configuration files, check and restore any changes required to the DNS and DHCP configuration files using the backups made earlier.

Create a backup or take a snapshot.

In the Foreman web UI, navigate to Monitor > Jobs.

Click Run Job.

From the Job category list, select Maintenance Operations.

From the Job template list, select Smart Proxy Upgrade Playbook.

In the Search Query field, enter the host name of the Smart Proxy.

Ensure that Apply to 1 host is displayed in the Resolves to field.

In the target_version field, enter the target version of the Smart Proxy.

In the whitelist_options field, enter the options.

Select the schedule for the job execution in Schedule.

In the Type of query section, click Static Query.

Create a backup.

Restore the backup on the new server.

If Foreman reaches the new database server via the old name, no further changes are required. Otherwise reconfigure Foreman to use the new name:

# foreman-installer \
--foreman-db-host newpostgres.example.com \
--katello-candlepin-db-host newpostgres.example.com \
--foreman-proxy-content-pulpcore-postgresql-host newpostgres.example.com

Enable the @theforeman/leapp COPR Repository, which contains Leapp packages with patches to support Foreman or Smart Proxy upgrades:

# dnf copr enable @theforeman/leapp

Install required packages:

# dnf install leapp leapp-upgrade-el8toel9

Install additional OS specific packages (leapp-data-almalinux for AlmaLinux, leapp-data-centos for CentOS Stream, or leapp-data-rocky for Rocky Linux). See ID in /etc/os-release for your operating system code.

# dnf install leapp-data-$ID

Add Foreman specific repositories to /etc/leapp/files/leapp_upgrade_repositories.repo:

[leapp-foreman]
name=Foreman nightly
baseurl=https://yum.theforeman.org/releases/nightly/el9/$basearch
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-foreman
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1

[leapp-foreman-plugins]
name=Foreman plugins nightly
baseurl=https://yum.theforeman.org/plugins/nightly/el9/$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0

Append Yum repositories for Puppet to /etc/leapp/files/leapp_upgrade_repositories.repo.

Let Leapp analyze your system:

# leapp preupgrade

Run leapp preupgrade again and make sure that it does not report any more issues.

Let Leapp create the upgrade environment:

# leapp upgrade

Reboot the system to start the upgrade.

Wait for Leapp to finish the upgrade. You can monitor the process with journalctl:

# journalctl -u leapp_resume -f

Verify the post-upgrade state. For more information, see Verifying the post-upgrade state in Upgrading from RHEL 8 to RHEL 9.

Perform post-upgrade tasks on the RHEL 9 system. For more information, see Performing post-upgrade tasks on the RHEL 9 system in Upgrading from RHEL 8 to RHEL 9.

Change SELinux to enforcing mode. For more information, see Changing SELinux mode to enforcing in Upgrading from RHEL 8 to RHEL 9.

For Enterprise Linux installations, unset the subscription-manager release:

# subscription-manager release --unset

Perform a full backup of your Foreman server or Smart Proxy. This is the source Enterprise Linux 8 server that you are migrating. For more information, see Performing a full backup of Foreman server or Smart Proxy server in Administering Foreman.

Deploy a system with Enterprise Linux 9 and the same hostname and configuration as the source server. This is the target server.

Restore the Foreman server or Smart Proxy server backups. For more information, see Restoring Foreman server or Smart Proxy server from a backup in Administering Foreman.