Setup Ansible

Tasks Planned
#1

Now that @gjkokinis has set up our Ansible repository, we should install Ansible on the desktops.

As documented here, Ansible is an agentless tool that manages remote machines via SSH:

Ansible is an agentless automation tool that by default manages machines over the SSH protocol.

To this end, it makes sense to have it installed by default on the Freeside Desktops.

Thankfully, there’s even a dnf package we can install:

ansible.noarch : SSH-based configuration management, deployment, and task
               : execution system
  • Install Ansible on the Freeside Desktops
  • Test the install by setting up automatic updates
  • Write some documentation on how to get up-and-running with the Ansible repository that we’ve got (might also want to make a Forum post linking to the instructions in the repository if that’s where we put them)
#2

I’ll take on this task.

#3

We’ve now got an ansible.cfg file to help make using Ansible easier.

Currently it ansible --list-hosts works as expected, but ansible all -m ping doesn’t always work.

In short, it boils down to this age-old issue:

Could not chdir to home directory /mnt/nfs/home/USERNAME_HERE: No such file or directory

I think the best solution will be to configure the Ansible inventory file to login to the hosts as root, and prompt for a password.

This way, we avoid the NFS mounting issue.

Of course, if anyone’s got any thoughts about the NFS mounting issue, it’d great to hear them :smiley:

Useful links:

Ansible tutorial:

https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/intro_getting_started.html

How to login as root with Ansible: