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Preparing your system for setup

Saurabh Badhwar edited this page Jun 1, 2017 · 1 revision

System Setup

Satellite-monitoring is a tool which has been written over top of ansible. It consists of various playbooks that automate the task of getting the required packages installed on your system and setting them up without any manual intervention.

For satellite-monitoring to work, we need to prepare our system with the required packages.

Currently, systems with RHEL 6 and RHEL 7 are supported by Satellite-monitoring

With the above requirements satisfied, let's move on to configuring our system for the installation of tools.

Enabling EPEL on RHEL Systems


Since, satellite-monitoring is written on top of ansible, we require the presence of ansible on our system. Currently, the ansible package lives on EPEL and to install that, we need to Enable EPEL.

For RHEL 6

rpm -ivh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-6.noarch.rpm

For RHEL 7

rpm -ivh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm

Once you are done Installing EPEL on the system, the next step is to install ansible.

Installing Ansible


To install ansible, execute the following command

yum install --enablerepo=epel ansible

This will install the ansible package and the required dependencies

Installing python-pip (optional)


python-pip is the package which provides you with the pip command. The package is important only if you are planning to install the Satellite statsd plugin.

To install python-pip, execute the command as mentioned below

yum install --enablerepo python-pip

Setting up password less SSH


Ansible uses SSH connections to remote systems to execute commands. Hence, for ansible to work, we need to setup our hosts with passwordless SSH access to the root account. Follow the below mentioned steps to setup passwordless SSH. You can skip these steps, if you have already setup a passwordless SSH for your hosts.

Generate a ssh key

For setting up passwordless access, you need to generate a ssh key. This can be done by executing the following command

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096

Follow the prompts as they arrive and leave the passphrase empty

Once a ssh key has been generated, the next step is to setup this key on all your hosts.

Deploying ssh key on hosts

For running satellite-monitoring, you may plan to use multiple hosts. This will require your key to be deployed to all the hosts you are trying to connect with. To deploy your ssh key, execute the following step for all your hosts:

ssh-copy-id -i <PATH_TO_SSH_KEY> root@host_address

Once done, we have our hosts setup with a passwordless authentication and we are ready to deploy our satellite-monitoring.