Many years ago, when I first started working at Red Hat, I worked up a package management domain model diagram. I’ve referred to it many times over the years, but have never posted or explained it in detail. Recently, discussions over image building software caused me to refer to it a few times. Here it is, with annotations below.
Continue readingThis one is going to be a little light on details, as we are still working through it, but I’d just like to share what I’ve been working on the past couple weeks. Note that this is for a proof-of-concept cluster, and is not for production.
Continue readingUsing a customer nameserver often requires disabling the DHCP based resolv.conf modifications. Here is what I got to work.
Continue readingThe world continues to embraces Rust for its safety properties. While writing utilities in Rust, we are going to have to work with existing code to perform common tasks. I recently needed to list the set of Linux groups registered on a system, and get access to the users assigned to each. Here’s my notes of what I learned.
Continue readingAfter some discussion with Bill Nottingham I got a little further along with what it would take to integrate Ansible Tower and FreeIPA. Here are the notes from that talk.
Continue readingAnsible is a workflow engine. I use it to do work on my behalf.
FreeIPA is an identity management system. It allows me to manage the identities of users in my organization
How do I get the two things to work together? The short answer is that it is trivial to do using Ansible Engine. It is harder to do using Ansible tower.
Edit: Second part is here. Third part is coming.
Continue readingMe. Us. Them.
The story I tell when I explain the various offereings that Red Hat has based on Ansible follow is based on the progression of Me. Us. Them.
Me: Get my playbook working for me on my workstation. For this, I use Ansible Engine.
Us: Share my playbook with my larger team. For this, I use Ansible Tower.
Them: Make a Self service catalog for the larger organization to consume. This is where Ansible integration into other products comes in to play. I typically talk about CloudForms integration here, but Satellite and OpenShift are also capable of making use of Ansible here.
Here is how I have my local setup for doing Ansible based development. This is organized roughly around how Tower will later consume the roles and playbooks I design here.
Continue readingIf you read the TripleO setup for network isolation, it lists eight distinct networks. Why does TripleO need so many networks? Lets take it from the ground up.
Continue reading
Ansible exists to help automate the time consuming repeated tasks that technologist depend upon. One very common jobs is to create and tear down a virtual machine. While cloud technologies have made this possible to perform remotely, there are many times when I’ve needed to setup and tear down virtual machines on systems that were stand alone Linux servers. In this case, the main interfaces to the machine are ssh and libvirt. I recently worked through an Ansible role to setup and tear down an virtual machine via libvirt, and I’d like to walk through it, and record my reasons for some of the decisions I made.
Continue reading
The Workstation on top of my server rack has 3 Ethernet ports. One is built in to the mother board, and and two are on a card. I want to use these three ports for different purposes. How can I tell which is which internally? The answer lies in /sys/bus/pci/devices/.