I went to a redhat provided training on this technology. Ansible vault and secrets password file is going to help out. Also doing roles will further automate things.
I have a lab setup consisting of eight raspberry pie zero w, that I’m using for various different demonstrations. The possibility to change the usage of them in a fast and reliable way during a lab session is a game changer for me. Thank you for this instructive video! Happy new year and I hope that your continue to make awesome videos in 2021 as well.
Would love a part two where you use ssh keys only, have day #1 deployments (new infra), day #2 (maintain existing infra). I have dozen of scripts for day #1 and I’m looking for best practices. Thanks !
This is the automation software I didn’t know I needed. You’ve saved me countless hours remoting into VM’s and RPI’s to update on a weekly maintenance schedule! Thanks Tim!
Dude, you've been killing it lately. I stumbled upon your channel a couple weeks ago, and it's amazing how similar our homelabs are. I haven't learned anything new yet, but I'm sticking around just in case. Keep up the good work, man!
Have you covered ssh-agent in any videos which mention key-based authentication? That wasn't a tool which was available when I started using ssh years ago, but since I discovered it recently it has transformed my workflow. I can enjoy the "no password" life but still have secure SSH keys!
Finally Ansible!!! Could you please make a tutorial about jenkins as well? In particualr, how to use jenkins to make docker image automatically whenever there is a new git commit.
Using Ubuntu 20.04.1 and getting "Ansible provisioning error! Using a SSH password instead of a key is not possible" ? Here's a workaround: 1) On your Ansible server, edit "/etc/ansible/ansible.cfg" 2) uncomment "host_key_checking = False" and save. 3) Run your ansible command. It should work now 4) Figure out how to add host keys of your servers.
Tim, thank you for taking the time to put this together for us. I really appreciate your teaching style and how you compartmentalize different tools and subjects the best you can. For example here you reference best practices via SSH keys, but chose not to go into it. I remember teaching myself about keys from Google and how it seemed like a huge deal at the time. Had that been included in this tutorial, many would have felt it to be overwhelming as you said. I am going to use your strategy of "containerizing" the subjects as I train my team in the future, thanks again.
What password is required 5:58 ish? I’m using WSL on Windows off a fresh install of Ubuntu. Am I to use the user and password of: Windows Ubuntu Master server node (raspberry pi) Or…? Thanks for the help in advance!
Dear Tim, thanks for your content, even though there are numerous great channels that do this kind of content there are only a handfull that present this in a interesting and engaging way. Most of the time I watch only the parts to get something running, but I watch all your videos from start to end!
This one of the easiest tutorial on youtube. Even I could follow it with any problems and that says alot. Great job!! I created a playbook which updates all my servers.
Bro you are literally a godsend. I've been updating all my servers like a peasant and now i can streamline this whole process! Keep up the fantastic work!
Nice introduction to Ansible. I've been doing some of these operations (apt update/upgrade, java check and install) automatically with a script language I've created. Writing code gives more flexibility, but also is more error-prone. Ansible clearly is a good product, and supporting SSH both with key files and passwords is elegant. My homebrewn solution depends on key-files for SSH and updated /etc/sudoers for non-password sudo. It would be nice if you post more videos about Ansible, and also let me give you an overall thanks for a lot of interesting topics on this channe (proxmox, freeNAS, kubernetes)!
I always wanted to learn Ansible, but all videos and websites were very complicated. You explained in a simple and didactic way what made me excited again to study. Congratulations on the great videos.
Great content, as usual! The way you set the timesync configuration is great for ad-hoc runs, first time setup, or to run when you actually know the file changes. Also keeps it easy for first time learners, good job! However I strongly believe we should be telling Ansible how we want our systems to be rather then what we want to be done (state vs execution) If you use Ansible in a "keep state" fashion, the timezone task would unnecessarily restart the service every time you run the playbook. A different practice would be to have a handler on the template, so it would trigger an action only when the file changes Also, I'm not entirely sure you really need to stop the service before change the config file. I'm not familiar with timesync but generally you don't need to do that for Linux services, a restart (or reload sometimes) after changing the file is enough. This is my suggestion on how to do that in an idempotent way: tasks: ... ... - name: Copy timesyncd config template: src: dst: /etc/systemd/timesyncd.conf notify: - restart timesyncd handlers: - name: restart timesyncd service: systemd-timesyncd state: restarted
Instead of hard-coding in the hosts file the names of the servers you want to access, is it possible to get them dynamically, at run time, from a directory server, if you have one in your network?
I would always see Ansible be mentioned on job applications, along with other qualifications I know I don't have. Seeing this video gave me a little more confidence in tech I've yet to understand. Thank you for that!
i really love that ntp example, i solved this this in a similarway too. One difference i solved it more task based, i set a variable in my hosts file like new_hostname=pihole and in the role i set the path to the configfile to something like this like this src: "{{ new_hostname }}/etc/systemd/timesyncd.conf", which in this example looks in the file folder for the folder pihole ( which it gets from the hostname variable i set and the hostname i declare in playbook or command line ) and then in the subfolders for the file, which allows me to deliver different timesyncd.config files for different clients withtout getting messy in the tasks main.yml cause for each use case or client there is a folderstructure with the correspondent config files =) Never tried to use it on windows, but i manage my root server with its vm's and my local raspberrypis with it. Youre absolutetly right with the ssh keys, not only is it more secure but it makes working with ansible so much more pleasant, especialy if youre in the phase of building roles / tasks / playing, sometimes things fail and having to type the password all the time sucks, keys make that anoyance dissapear, especialy if you want to reach a machine over a bastion host
I've been using ansible for years now. Automate machine deployments, updates, config changes, STIG compliance, auditing on and no and on. Awesome tool. Love your video.
i loved the intro, I wasn't sure what ansible was. You grave a great overview, and then when into the technical. I got to learn what.I needed/wanted about ansible. I learned that it;s a cool tool for automating repetitive tasks, primarily for ssh tasks. This is something that I'll never need, it was nice to bug out before the technical, knowing this will be an awesome video, just not my video. But I still throw in a like and this comment to make the interactions high!!! Because it was awesome that I got to not have to sit through technical, trying to figure out what the hell the tool does!!!
Hi Tim, great video. I am wondering if it is possible to automate proxmox servers upgrades, not just VMs. Can't find a proper playbook for that. Thanks
I use Ansible in conjunction with Terraform to create a fictitious customer network of VMs. We use the range for Red Teaming and Cyber exercise practice. The last administrator retired, so now I have inherited this project and still have a lot to learn but it is fascinating and fun! I wish I had watched your video before I started looking at the ansible code but I feel it helped me understand your content better. Thanks for the video!
Hi Tim, I have a nice example for a playbook that only restarts if the uploaded config file has changed. name: Restart service when config file is copied become: true become_user: root notify: - "restart service" handlers: - name: "restart service" service: - name: "{{ service_name }}" state: restarted tasks: - name: Check if config file has changed stat: - path: "{{ config_file }}" register: config_stat - name: Restart service if config file has changed service: - name: "{{ service_name }}" state: restarted when: config_stat.stat.mtime != ansible_date_time.iso8601
An update on usage. Not sure why but the ansible ping wouldn't work. The following worked for me on Arch Linux "ansible -i -m ping .... " i.e. the group name needs to come after the module.
I'm trying to learn Ansible since it's part of the Network Automation learning path for Cisco. Their documentation was a bit complex to understand and I would just get bored trying to understand it and eventually the knowledge would slip out of my head. With the way you discussed it, I'm starting to grasp it better now and am actually interested seeing as now I have a better understanding. Thanks.
Hi Tim, thanks for the content. please I need help with configuring a mail server and testing if it works. I have successfully provisioned the server using Terraform and I can configure it manually but I'm struggling to do it with Ansible for a large scale deployment. please any tips or pointers would be greatly appreciated. thanks
Can anyone please suggest me some, homelab network security guides?? I am student ( i dont have much hw ) I use two Intel NUC's for Proxmox, two Rasps, one synlogy NAS and a pc and laptop other small devices. I want to setup security for my homelab. ( My Homelab is not public network facing & i am single user for all these devices ), so how i setup security to these device so can i ensure that my network is secure as a homelab user?? Please give me a suggetion I read so many posts on reddit ( people uses the unifi devices and pfsense ), I also want to setup pfsense but in my region ( devices like protectli & netgate is not availble ( It very costly to import ) ). If anyone suggests pfsense please suggest a small factor hardware that is easily available so can setup on my network.
I know this is an older video, but it would be real neat to see how you setup servers for key login; for a thing like Ansible it seems like you'd need a TON of keys or sharing the same key across servers. Maybe a dedicated Ansible user on your systems?
Tim, just found your video and love your teaching style. Great presentations and very easy to understand. I have to learn ansible for work and this helps 100%. See you on twitch!
The python versioning and requiring an environment activation now makes this a whole separate layer of learning a new prerequisite before even starting the original task.
haha man i went to learn ansible and it just lead me down the virtual machine rabbithole in the first five minutes and i havent even gotten around to actually doing anything with ansible
Oh brother, I have to say. Thank you for working on your sound quality recently. I just subbed to your channel & watched some of your recent videos aaand being a self-proclaimed audiophile I really do appreciate it. Actually, all you do...Wow! every detail that you go into that others leave out. Nice!!! and Thank You!
Hey Tim, I've been using Proxmox for a few years, along with KVM based alternatives prior to, but I've been through a few kernel editions with Debian or Ubuntu. For the "qemu-guest-agent" I've only recently been able to get this working properly in Deb 10, where as 9 and 8 seem to be unresponsive when shutdown is executed via PVE making the alternative ACPI... Have you encountered this issue with early kernels (provided you use Debian)?
@@TechnoTim I'll be darn..admittedly I've used Debian as my go-to 9/10th's the time with any guest OS, and with LXC, but I tested the guest agent on Xenial LTS, no issues
Hecks yeah! Ansible! My take is that even with only 1 test server, Ansible is still worth while. It allows you to get your server into a state where you expect it to be.
Tim, I run a discord server dedicated to home labs and tech talks... you come up often. Seems like everything you're doing perfectly lines up with what we're doing. Thanks for the great content, great presentation, and great explanations.
Great video, thanks. I started using Ansible a few months ago, it has been working very well. I have configured things slightly differently, I have used "roles" for each sort of thing I want to be on each system (web server, router, ssh, misc, etc.) and then control that via a playbook that pulls in the roles. For me the nice part about roles is I can have all the templates, config files, etc. all in the role directory of each role so I know what files belong to what role.
Just subscribed. Love the content. I am still thinking through Ansible vs Bash for this function. The only thing I know right now about Ansible is from your video. I am guessing there are some benefits of Ansible I am missing, but just from this video I am thinking Bash would be the most straightforward way to do it.
Thank you! Ansible has modules that work across operating systems, it can validate and set desired state, prevent config drift, and remote execute. There are plenty more features.
I can see you are a beginer in ansible your playbook look more like roles to me a role will typicaly have one objectif, for exemple setup your ntp client. Or your account on the servers... I even use a role that I named common to settup my NTP client and my DNS server side. Yet you explain ansible in a very simple way ! I think when have a better understanding of ansible you should show us how you made your playnbook evolved 😉
Short and maybe stupid q, but how can you make playbooks to run automatically, to be scheduled, only via crontab ? I also readed something about ansible tower but I think it's not free, thank you!
Ok but you still need to install ansible and come up with the commands to run for your tasks, would be nice if there were a system that would do all that for you. Like I don't need to be writing scripts to create users and do all the nitty-gritty docker setup for whatever *nix system it needs it on, and each system has different quirks. I want an orchestrator that I can tell to install a set of users/pubkeys and a set of programs and provision permissions and it will do it without me needing to know if it needs apt or yum or what the repo urls are for the linux version or whatever. That's where it gets tedious. Otherwise everything is in a script from the first time I do it and I can just git pull and run the script for repetitive tasks (or put that in a cron job). So honestly I don't really see the point of Ansible unless you're running a ton of identical servers.
Thanks Tim for this Ansible tool introduction. I saw your channel yesterday. After watching your video, immediately I liked and subscribed. I have to learn about Ansible and Chef for the CCNA certification.
Actually, the changes you always see is due to stop/start the service: the template file is not copied over if the destination file is exactly the same (that's implied by the Ansible module that performs that check for you). In fact, in your run, when performing the copy task, only a server results as changed because of the file copy (the other ones are not changed, because you had already copied the same file).
I love ansible, I have used it for years!!! When you manage about 200 servers it just makes it cake! Also because I like to, I sometimes create adhoc scripts hahaha because why not!
The qemu app, how does it get the installation file to install on your servers. Does it pull it from the internet or how does it reference the file to install it?
