Satellite 6.1 supposedly supports bonded network interfaces. If it does, we’ve yet to get it working.
To be fair, this is a slightly more complex setup with two interfaces on separate cards heading to separate switches using LACP for resilience which is more complex than balancing. There are then a number of virtual interfaces hanging off this on separate vlans.
However even without the VLAN interfaces in play, a basic bond fails and we are then presented with a failure cascade.
- Foreman (the part of Satellite that controls provisioning) decides to change the IP of the provisioning node, not sure why, support case currently open. This happens whatever you do. Update – see below
- You then delete the node which runs fine but leaves a dangling entry in DHCP because the MAC address has changed
- You then have to edit the lease file to remove the entry and restart the daemon
- Leave this to long and Satellite accepts fact uploads from the deleted node, adding it back into the foreman database and preventing re-provisioning. You then have to run db removal commands alluded to in my previous post. Update – see below
I have back-ported this fix:
http://projects.theforeman.org/issues/10607
which seems to prevent duplicate bonds getting created (another problem) but so far it hasn’t been an easy ride.
If you’re looking at using Satellite 6.1 to provision bonded networks (these are RHEL 7.2 machines) then I would avoid and use snippets, which is what we have done here and appear to be through the worst of the above.
Alternatively consider later versions of foreman with better bonding support?
Update: I have discovered that setting the following:
ignore_puppet_facts_for_provisioning=true
resolved the MAC address changing issue
and
create_new_host_when_report_is_uploaded=false
create_new_host_when_facts_are_uploaded=false
resolves hosts getting re-added to the database after deletion.
Can't stop fiddling... 