The 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 readingI’m writing a simple utility for manage the /etc/hosts file. I want it in a native language so I can make it SUID, or even better, to lock it down via capabilities. I want to remember how to code in rust. Once I get a simple bit working, I want to refactor. Here’s what I did.
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.
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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.
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Ozz did a fantastic job laying out the rules around policy. This article assumes you’ve read that. I’ll wait.
Lets say you are an administrator of an OpenStack cloud. This means you are pretty much all powerful in the deployment. Now, you need to perform some operation, but you don’t want to give it full admin privileges? Why? well, do you work as root on your Linux box? I hope note. Here’s how to set up a self trust for a reduced set of roles on your token.
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My laptop is my Demo machine. I need to be able to run the Red Hat cloud Suite of software on it. I want to install this software the same way a customer would. However, much of this software is server side software, and my machine was registered as a workstation. This means the Red Hat Content network won’t show me the server yum repositories. Here is how I converted my machine to be a server.