Post

How to rock IT automation with ansible 🤘🦾:

Imagine the following situation - you have worked in IT for a while and some virtual machines + the services running on them need to be updated What do you do?

well… You could: 🔍 search for all the hostnames, 🤝 gather possible login options 🕵️ find username/password combinations 🤪 go mad because it’s taking too long OR!

You could use your “well prepared automation setup” that features: 🤖 ansible 🦾 packer 🧞‍♀️ terraform 🔐 vault WAYYYY cooler, right? RIGHT?

In case you dont know what all of these tools are - they are great 🤪 We shall start with ansible - the ez pz 🍋 patch engine

Well, it was not made for patching but who am I to judge if you need an automated solution and this is all you have?! 🧑🏻‍⚖️❌ ansible is basically your go to shop 🏪 for running commands on existing machines it logs in for you, runs commands for you and gives you feedback if it all worked out

and the best part? you do _NOT_ have to install it on the client systems, only on your host / the controlling node! Ok great, but how do we start ➡️ 🏁

First, install ansible on your host machine via: sudo apt-get install ansible (if your host is debian/ubuntu based)

smash that y button and the enter key right afterwards and then wait until the install is finished ⏳ → ⌛️

cool cool cool - what now? now you need to identify how you can connect to the controlled machine - e.g. via ssh if it is linux that means ssh needs to run on the controlled machine - check via: systemctl status ssh

now generate a private key on your host machine with ssh-keygen -b 4096 make sure to enter the correct location and add a passkey if you care about security 🙏

wonderful - now two options exist 1. you copy the public ssh key to the machine via copy/paste 2. you use ssh-copy-id We shall use 2. today, because it is freaking cool!

you type: ssh-copy-id -i <location_of_your_ssh_key> username@controlled-machine press enter and then you need to enter the password for the controlled-machine user if all goes well you see something similar to the following image: