Ansible is a great automation tool which should be in any developer or administrator's toolbox, just like Cobbler/Koan, Jenkins and others.  Or as they put it:

No matter your role, or your automation goals, Ansible can help you connect teams and deliver efficiencies.

Ansible is an open source IT automation engine that automates provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, orchestration, and many other IT processes. It is free to use, and the project benefits from the experience and intelligence of its thousands of contributors.

It saves me so much time in the long run, and allows me, when combined with Cobbler/Koan, to quickly do things like build or rebuild a server from scratch, especially once I have a given set of scripts fine-tuned. I have used it to cleanly rebuild servers with larger virtual disks from the start, make a variant of another machine, or to even to things like adding a new PHP version to an existing machine. Simply edit a simple text file defining some variables in YAML format, save, and on my control server, running a playbook. Simple as that.

To read more, here are some resources for you:

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ansible

Dang it Red Hat!!!

Submitted by douglas.w.needham on

If you have looked around this site, or know me and have heard me discuss it, I have an honest to goodness Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription. I am not talking about the rebuilt version called Rocky Linux, which is the successor to CentOS after Red Hat changed that distro from being just a rebuilt/relabeled version of the corresponding RHEL version to a stream version sitting somewhere behind Fedora and before RHEL. 

Ansible and my evolving software install philosophy over the years

Submitted by admin on

When I first got started with computers, there really was no choice for how you installed software. Indeed, you tended to do things like boot off a different cassette tape, pluggable cartridge or later, floppies. But then, there was a little bit of evolution, and you would boot the operating system off of one set of media, and insert a new floppy to run the program. There were no hard drives for these computers, those were reserved for the systems which colleges/universities and businesses had, and they cost in some cases, tens of thousands of dollars.

New Video: Repeatable, automated installs using ansible and cobbler – Part 2

Submitted by admin on

A brief update on the ongoing process of getting a new, up-to-date cobbler server running with the associated DNS and DHCP services. We discuss some of the issues encountered so far, including briefly discussing SELinux issues, and touch upon next steps which will hopefully have us successfully complete the installation.

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ansible
cobbler
SELinux
YouTube

Select New Video: Repeatable, automated installs using ansible and cobbler – Part 1 New Video: Repeatable, automated installs using ansible and cobbler – Part 1

Submitted by admin on

It has been awhile since I have posted anything here, mainly due to work, and more recently the lack of it. One of the things I have been doing while pursuing a new job is upgrading one of my core servers, where my DNS, DHCP and cobbler servers run. It is an older, home-built 4U server with an Athlon 2500 processor, and has functioned remarkably well for more than 15 years (as they say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it).

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ansible
cobbler
YouTube

@#$%@ Ansible

Submitted by admin on

While the title may indicate that this is a core dump post, I won't quite say that it clears that hurdle... quite... But it is definitely a frustration which has raised its head a few times, and over the past 24 hours, went from a minor nuisance to a major frustration.

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