Ansible and FreeIPA Part-1

Ansible 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.

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Your Own, Personal, Ansible

Me. 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.

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Azure: from Portal to Ansible: part 1

While Azure figured prominently in my work about a year ago, I have not had as much to do with it again until recently. I had to relearn everything I had set up last year. As a Keystone and FreeIPA developer, I was focused on identity. Thus, it is somewhat ironic that I had problems getting my head around the identity setup when using Ansible to manage Azure. Here are the steps I went through to go from using the Web Portal to getting Ansible to work. Part one gets through the identity stuff.

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Remotely Provisioning a Virtual Machine using Ansible and Libvirt

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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