This will be a short post today, feeling pretty dumb. Just learned the hard way that Ansible variable names can not start with numbers. It even says so in the first line of the documentation on variables: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/playbooks_variables.html#creating-valid-variable-names You’ll get some pretty weird output if you try and start them with numbers. Basically it parses
Read MoreToday I ran into an issue building a patching playbook for my Linux VMs. I have a mix of Ubuntu, and a couple of CentOS versions. I began with testing against Ubuntu and CentOS 8, and everything worked really well. As soon as I brought a CentOS 7 box into the mix, I started receiving
Read MoreAn issue I ran into the other day when trying to setup Active Directory authentication in Ansible AWX, using LDAP auth type. These are a couple things that aren’t exactly called out in the documentation from Red Hat, and might not be obvious to all. You can use ldap:// if you aren’t setup for ldaps://
Read MoreAnsible doesn’t always have to be crazy complex playbooks doing super cool stuff. Sometimes, it’s really useful to get some output from al your devices like versioning, VLANs, IP addresses, etc… Here I plan to collect some of the one-liners I end up using so others can see what’s possible. This will be a dynamic
Read MoreSometimes in Ansible you need to support legacy devices, or API’s that require hard coded passwords or API strings in your playbooks. One way around this is to use custom credential objects in AWX/Tower. This can keep your playbooks generic for storage in your version control system, and shareable, while keeping your credentials safe. If
Read MoreWhy VLANs? When I first started trying to setup my first MikroTik device, I very quickly ran into issues trying to configure VLANs. Using VLANs is so second-nature to me now coming from a Cisco background. In almost any network you should be using VLANs to segment devices off into logical groupings instead of having
Read More# TIL It appears that you are required to use a .ini file with inventory scripts in Ansible. If you try and use static variables in the script, it will appear to work when running the raw Python or whatever you’re using to gather the data. It will then fail with seemingly nondescript errors when
Read MoreWhat is PoE? Power over Ethernet… the ability to power an endpoint device such as a phone, access point, or raspberry pi over the same cable that delivers its network connection. Quite a wonderful thing if you ask me. Less cords! But, there’s so many types, PoE, PoE+, 802.3af, 802.3at, active, passive, etc… PoE, Type
Read MoreThis will be a running list of useful sites and various links to tidbits I come across and find useful. Sites Learn/test regular expressions (regex). https://regex101.com/ Test Sed commands/filtering https://sed.js.org/ Generate Cron strings https://crontab.guru Software Working with APIs. Makes building urls and testing basic strings much simpler. Also will show you code output for several
Read MoreThere are a couple of ways to get more information about why a command/playbook is failing. These are listed more or less, in order growing more verbose. This is a pretty long post mostly due to the example output. Debug module in playbook The second most common method is using the debug module in your
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