Manual Installation of Avalon Using Puppet

Instructions

1. Create and log into a CentOS 6.x or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x system as a user with sudo rights

   The current Puppet script has issues if executed on a clean, "minimal" CentOS. A "minimal desktop" CentOS is recommended.

2. Become root

   sudo -s

3. Disable SELinux (which we're not currently set up to support)

   echo 0 > /selinux/enforce 
   sed -ie "s/SELINUX=enforcing/SELINUX=permissive/" /etc/selinux/config
   

4. Install puppet from the Puppet Labs repository

   rpm -ivh http://yum.puppetlabs.com/el/6/products/i386/puppetlabs-release-6-10.noarch.rpm
   yum install puppet

   On CentOS 7

   rpm -ivh http://yum.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs-release-el-7.noarch.rpm

5. Install git

   yum install git 

6. Install Ruby 2.2.5 if ruby current version is lower

   ruby -v
   #The following command won't work the first time. 
   # It will request you download the signatures first 
   # and provide the command to download it.
   curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s
   source /usr/local/rvm/scripts/rvm
   rvm install 2.2.5
   rvm use 2.2.5
   gem install bundler

7. Install json extensions for the system ruby

   gem install ruby-json

8. Clone the Avalon install script

   git clone --recursive --depth 1 https://github.com/avalonmediasystem/avalon-installer.git -b 5.x-stable
   cd avalon-installer

9. Set up the installation variables

   export INSTALL_DIR=`pwd`
   ln -s $INSTALL_DIR/files /etc/puppet/avalon_files

10. Collect facts to feed to puppet about your installation, the following will create hiera/data/custom.yaml

    ruby -r './fact_gatherer.rb' -e 'FactGatherer.gather_facts'

     

    Facter can't detect some early CentOS 7 versions, if so run

    yum update

11. Execute the puppet script

    rvm system do puppet apply --fileserverconfig=$INSTALL_DIR/fileserver.conf \
    --modulepath=$INSTALL_DIR/modules --hiera_config=$INSTALL_DIR/hiera/hiera.yaml \
    --templatedir=$INSTALL_DIR/templates manifests/init.pp --detailed-exitcodes

    It is important to give a hostname when asked, otherwise Avalon/Fedora may not work.
    If you see errors like "Could not prefetch firewall provider 'iptables'", then running `iptables --flush` will help.

    
    Be patient. The manifest needs to download, install and configure a whole lot of dependencies and servers. This could take 30 minutes or more even with a fast connection.

12. When the script finishes, open a web browser and connect to the public address for your server (e.g.,http://avalon.example.edu/) Create a new user with email archivist1@example.com, this is the default collection_manager and group_manager.

NOTE: Puppet needs to download dozens of system packages, software distributions, source files, and other information, largely from trusted third party repositories. Sometimes, one or more repositories might be offline, unresponsive, or otherwise unavailable, causing Puppet to display a series of errors about failed dependencies. Fortunately, Puppet can usually figure out how to make things right. Simply repeat the puppet apply ... command in step 11 to try to repair the install.

Ports

The Avalon Media System requires several ports to be open to client browsers. The Vagrant Install handles all the port forwarding for local access automatically, but the manual install will require attention to make sure the required ports are open and accessible. Here are the manual instructions.

Using the System

• You can find specific information about using the system in the Collection Manager's Guide. 
• Configure additional features
• Install sample content
• Known Issues - a list of bugs, workarounds, and cautions