vagrant-foreman

Pre-reqs

you need to have the following installed on your host machine:

• virtualbox
• packer
• vagrant
• git-bash
• google chrome

Once they are all installed, do the following:

1. right click on the virtualbox icon,
2. go to properties,
3. select the shortcut tab
4. click on the "advanced" button
5. enable the "Run as Administrator" checkbox
6. Then apply and save changes
7. Repeat the above steps, but this time for Git bash, You can find this icon under, start -> All programs -> git -> Git Bash

Next we need to configure Git bash to make it easier to use:

1. Open new git bash tereminal
2. right click on the header -> defaults -> "Options" tab -> enable check boxes (there's four in total)
3. Select the "Layout" tab
4. Adjust screen/window sizes according to your liking. Also choose a high number for the "Height" option under "screen buffer size", e.g. 5000.
5. Close git bash terminal, then reopen it again.
6. Right click on the header -> properties.
7. View the necessary tabs to ensure that your changes are now reflected.

This will allow you to scroll up further and do copy-pasting in/out of the git-bash terminal more easily.

Pre-reqs (optional, but recommended)

Open up a git-bash terminal and:

• run the ssh-keygen command on your host machine (if you haven't already done this in past).
• run the following to enter your credentials (if you haven't already done this in past):

$ git config --global user.name "John Doe"
$ git config --global user.email johndoe@example.com
$ git config --global core.autocrlf false
$ git config --global push.default simple

On your (linux) host machine, create the following folder and add the following files:

$ ls -l /c/vagrant-personal-files/
total 1
drwxr-xr-x    4 SChowdhu Administ        0 Dec 21 14:20 GitServerCertificates
-rw-r--r--    1 SChowdhu Administ      210 Apr 20  2015 hiera.yaml
-rw-r--r--    1 SChowdhu Administ      291 Sep 30 08:52 r10k.yaml

However if your host machine is a windows machine, then create folder "C:\vagrant-personal-files" and place the above files in there instead.

The "GitServerCertificates" folder should contain .pem files only, so that you can also do secure git clones inside your vm, i.e. "git clone https://..." as well as plain "git clone http://...".

Set up

Start a git-bash terminal

cd into the project folder and run the following to create the 2 ".box"" files

$ packer build master.json
$ packer build agent.json
$ packer build agent6.json     # useful if you want to build linux 6 puppet agent. 

Each of the above commands will take about 40 minutes to complete, but depends on your machine specs and internet connections.

The Run the following:

$ vagrant up puppetmaster

Next, you have a choice linux 6 and linux 7 puppet agents that you can start up. The following are Linux 7 machines:

$ vagrant up puppetagent01
$ vagrant up puppetagent02

And here are the Linux 6 machines:

$ vagrant up puppetagent05
$ vagrant up puppetagent06

Set up local rerouting if you are running vagrant on windows machine

Enter this in the windows hosts file (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts):

192.168.50.10   puppetmaster puppetmaster.local
192.168.50.11   puppetagent01 puppetagent01.local
192.168.50.12   puppetagent02 puppetagent02.local
192.168.50.15   puppetagent05 puppetagent05.local
192.168.50.16   puppetagent06 puppetagent06.local

Login credentials

you can ssh into all your machines using:

username: vagrant 
password: vagrant

or:

username: root 
password: vagrant

You can also open up your foreman server by going to https://puppetmaster.local/ (open this in google chrome)

The admin login credentials to login in via the foreman web gui console is:

username: admin 
password: password

Auto snapshots

On accasions you'll want to reset your vagrant boxes. This is usually done by doing "vagrant destroy" followed by "vagrant up". This can be timeconsuming. A much faster approach is to use virtualbox snapshots instead.

For each vm, a virtualbox is taken towards the end of your "vagrant up". This snapshot is called "baseline". If you want to roll back to this snapshot, then you do:

vagrant snapshot go puppetmaster baseline

...or for a puppetagent, e.g. puppetagent01, you do:

vagrant snapshot go puppetagent01 baseline

Start all over again

If you want to start from the begining again, then do:

vagrant destroy
vagrant box list
vagrant box remove {box name}

Then delete the 2 .box files, or in fact the entire vagrant project then do a git clone again.