Foreman » Installer

A simple reproducer on EL 8 & 9 with Puppetserver 7 installed:

dnf install https://yum.puppet.com/puppet8-release-el-9.noarch.rpm -y
dnf upgrade puppetserver
# At this point puppetserver is in a restart loop because /usr/bin/java is too old
foreman-installer

The expected result is that this works, but this fails because it can't start puppetserver.

The root cause is very subtle. Puppet will check if the service is running using /bin/systemctl is-active -- puppetserver, but it's not active because it's stuck in a restart loop where puppetserver is in activating. It may still have a start going from before /etc/sysconfig/puppetserver was modified.

Confusingly, eventually puppetserver will start so the next installer run will succeed.