Searching for the Source(s) of Truth in Holistic Automation
The Source of Truth (SoT) concept has become a cornerstone for achieving holistic automation in the ever-evolving IT and network management landscape. As org...
Automation
CFD6 VMware API Questions
CFD6 VMware API Questions
Ansible Blocks With Conditionals
Ansible Blocks With Conditionals
Streamlining OS Deployments
UPDATE: 2023-05-11 - I found this post in my backlog, and it was never published or finished, as you can see. This conversation continues to be something ...
Using ARA Records Ansible Within Projects
While exploring some options to provide a level of reporting capabilities as part of a project I figured using ARA would be an awesome idea. My goal was to p...
Ansible - Using YAML For Inventory
Backgroud
Ansible - Raspberry Pi Kubernetes Cluster
Recently I started working on a little project which involved building a Kubernetes cluster using Raspberry Pi’s. I published this project on GitHub under an...
Ansible - Older Than N-Days Epoch
I recently had a scenario in which I needed to determine if a device’s last check-in time had been longer than 30 days. The real fun with this is that the re...
Ansible - IP Sets and DShield Block List
In this post, we are going to look into how we can leverage Ansible to manage a Linux firewall using ipset along with a DShield block list. Now, why would we...
Ansible - Defining Variables As Dictionaries
This post is to go through an example of defining Ansible variables as dictionaries rather than lists. I wanted to throw this together as I have not found a ...
Terraform - vSphere - CentOS 7 Customization Issues
I was recently working on a project to spin up about ~50 VMs which were all based on CentOS 7.4 and ran into an issue during the customization phase failing....
Ansible - MAAS Management
Several months back I was working quite a bit with MAAS and needed a way to fully automate not only the MAAS deployment but also the management of VMs. In th...
Generating/Executing Terraform Plans Using Ansible
Recently I have been working on a little project of my own based on provisioning a vSphere environment using Ansible as the primary automation tool. My inten...
Ansible 2.3.1 - sshpass Error
As you may or may not be aware, Ansible 2.3.1.0 was recently released. After installing Ansible 2.3.1.0 in my Python virtual environment I immediately ran in...
Ansible - Parsing CSV List Of Hosts (IP, hostname(s), MAC)
Recently I had a need to take an already populated spreadsheet which contained a list of hostnames, generic names, IP addresses and MAC addresses and convert...
Ansible - SSH Known Host Keys
I wanted to throw this together mainly for my own reference but maybe it will help someone else as well. I had a need to add every host’s ssh keys to every h...
Ansible - Provision Docker Swarm Mode (1.12)
Lately I have been working quite a bit with the latest Docker Swarm Mode released in Docker 1.12 and so far it has been pretty awesome. The days of spinning ...
Docker - Ansible - ELK Stack
In this post we will be going over setting up a quick and easy way to standup ELK Stack using Docker containers for each of our components required. Keep in ...
Vagrant - Multi-Group Ansible Provisioning
As I continue to develop different scenario testing I continually try to leverage a common Vagrantfile across scenarios while only having to adjust variables...
Ansible - Using the set_facts module
Today I was writing/updating an Ansible role for installing Cacti monitoring and decided to add the ability to choose the back-end webserver being used. The ...
Docker - Building containers using Ansible
Have you thought about building Docker containers using some Ansible role(s) or playbook(s) you may already be using for your regular automated deployments? ...
Vagrant - Ansible Provisioning multi-nodes
I am just throwing this out here for my own reference because I seem to always forget how to do this when spinning up multiple nodes within a Vagrant environ...
Ansible - Setting up an Ansible Control Machine
In this post we will be setting up an Ansible Control Machine to execute our Ansible tasks from. This server will not have writable access to our Git repos s...
Ansible - Clean Formatted Playbooks
While going through and doing some cleanup to various different roles and playbooks in my Ansible collection I wanted to share what I feel is good clean form...
Ansible - Debian Based Gotchas - Part-1
As I am currently running through some Docker setups between Debian Jessie and Ubuntu Trusty using Ansible I ran into a few gotchas. Now I would have assumed...
Ansible - Discover and Backup PowerDNS
While working on a solution that requires PowerDNS, I have come to a point in which I would like to include backup and recovery options for this solution. So...
Packer - Vagrant - Ansible - Windows
While doing some Packer builds for Windows Server 2012 R2 to be used with Vagrant in order to do some Ansible learning I stumbled across this issue.
Hey, I can DevOPS my Network too! – Manual-configured OSPF (Part 5)
In the previous post we setup our OSPF routing topology auto-configured using Ansible. Which works really nice when we already know what our variable definit...
Hey, I can DevOPS my Network too! – Auto-configured OSPF (Part 4)
In the last post we spun up (Vagrant Up) our environment. So at this point we are ready to start exploring and seeing how easy it is to bring up OSPF auto-co...
Hey, I can DevOPS my Network too! – Vagrant Up (Part 3)
In the last post we defined our nodes to spin up with Vagrant which will be used from here on out during our series. In this post we will actually be spinnin...
Hey, I can DevOPS my Network too! – Prep-Work (Part 1)
In the previous post we went over the intro on what we will be setting up by going through each of these posts. In this post we will be setting up our enviro...
Hey, I can DevOPS my Network too! – Define Nodes (Part 2)
In the previous post we prepped our environment in order to get everything ready to begin building out our environment. Which means we are now ready to final...
Hey, I can DevOPS my Network too! - Intro
This will be the introduction to a multi-post series on some different methodologies that you too can use everyday either to learn, test or develop your goin...
Learning Vagrant and Ansible Provisioning
After attending Tech Field Day (#NFD10) there was a great deal of discussion around using Vagrant and Ansible for building out environments and provisioning ...