Searching for the Source(s) of Truth in Automation
Walk into almost any enterprise and you will find the same thing. Three teams, three tools, no shared view. The networking team has stood up Nautobot or NetB...
Automation
What I Learned Watching Teams Automate Without a Center of Gravity
It has been a little over three years since I last wrote anything here, and the biggest change in that time is not a tool or a platform. It is what I do day ...
CFD6 VMware API Questions
CFD6 VMware API Questions
Ansible Blocks With Conditionals
Refreshed June 2026: module names updated to FQCN, the docs link fixed, and the examples re-verified against current ansible-core. The behavior described ...
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
Refreshed June 2026: the YAML example now uses the canonical all / children structure, and I added two sections on checking and converting inventories wit...
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
Refreshed June 2026: the approach here still works, but a few things moved since 2018. The ipaddr filter now lives in the ansible.utils collection, the DS...
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
Refreshed June 2026: when I wrote this, there was no first-class Ansible integration for MAAS, so I templated inventory out of the maas CLI by hand. Canon...
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)
Refreshed June 2026: when I first wrote this, parsing a CSV in Ansible meant a file lookup plus a hand-written Jinja2 template. The community.general.read...
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
Refreshed June 2026: the Vagrant ansible.groups mechanism shown here still works the same way, so the core of the post is unchanged. What needed updating ...
Ansible - Using the set_fact module
Refreshed June 2026: the original solved this with six set_fact tasks, one per OS and webserver combination, each gated by a when. The cleaner pattern now...
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
Refreshed June 2026: the original did this with two playbooks, a shell wrapper, and a chain of curl, jq, grep, replace, and lineinfile to turn JSON into a...
Ansible - Using Ansible on Windows
Refreshed June 2026: the original version of this post installed Ansible on Windows through Cygwin, with Python 2 and Ansible 1.9. That approach is long d...
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 ...
Ansible - Generate Rundeck Inventory
Refreshed June 2026: the original version of this post generated Rundeck’s resources.xml by hand, with a templated play and a couple of sed cleanups. You ...
Ansible - KeepAliveD
Refreshed June 2026: module names are now FQCN, the handler uses ansible.builtin.service, and the health check in the template is wired in with a track_sc...
Ansible Playbook - GlusterFS - Apache
Read this first (June 2026): GlusterFS is effectively legacy now. Red Hat ended Gluster Storage and disbanded its engineering team at the end of 2024, ups...
Ansible Playbook - LVM
Refreshed June 2026: the original used bare module names with the old key=value argument style, installed the wrong package on RHEL, and shelled out to lv...
Creating vSphere VMs using Ansible
Refreshed June 2026: the original used the vsphere_guest module, the pysphere Python library, Ansible 1.8.4, and vCenter 6.0. All four are gone. vsphere_g...