ansible

I realized I've never posted this playbook to my blog... I needed to grab it for a project I'm working on, so I figured I'd post it here for future reference.

Basically, I need a playbook I can run whenever, that will ensure all packages are upgraded, then checks if a reboot is required, and if so, reboots the server. Afterwards, it removes any dependencies no longer required.

---
- hosts: all
  gather_facts: yes
  become: yes

  tasks:
    - name: Perform a dist-upgrade.
      ansible.builtin.apt:
        upgrade: dist
        update_cache: yes

    - name: Check if a reboot is required.
      ansible.builtin.stat:
        path: /var/run/reboot-required
        get_checksum: no
      register: reboot_required_file

    - name: Reboot the server (if required).
      ansible.builtin.reboot:
      when: reboot_required_file.stat.exists == true

    - name: Remove dependencies that are no longer required.
      ansible.builtin.apt:
        autoremove: yes

I've started getting a lot of bug reports on my repos to the effect of "Ansible won't install on my Raspberry Pi anymore". Accompanying it is a debug message like one of the following:

$ python3 -m pip install ansible
...
No matching distribution found for ansible-core<2.13,>=2.12.0 (from ansible)

# Alternatively:
ERROR: No matching distribution found for ansible-core<2.13,>=2.12.0

The problem is ansible-core 2.12 has a new hard requirement for Python 3.8 or newer. And ansible-core 2.12 is included in Ansible 5.0.0, which was recently released. Raspberry Pi OS, which was based on Debian 10 ("Buster") until recently, includes Python 3.7, which is too old to satisfy Ansible's installation requirements.

There was recently a fix that makes it so Ansible 5.x won't get installed on these older systems, but who wants to get stuck on old unsupported Ansible versions?

There are three options:

At AnsibleFest 2021, I presented a session titled Automating the Uncommon - Ansible automates everything!.

Since watching on-demand versions of the AnsibleFest sessions requires a signup, I thought I'd also post the session to my YouTube channel, so everyone can learn from it without registering. The session seemed well-received, and I hope it shows that, as I state in my 'Rule of Golden Hammers':

I demonstrate how I use Ansible to:

Recently I upgraded from an Intel-based MacBook Pro to two M1 Macs. As part of the upgrade, I also made sure to refine my Mac setup automation with Ansible and my Mac Development Ansible Playbook.

But one weird thing I noticed was no matter how I installed Ansible on my new Macs, I couldn't get libyaml support to work:

For a long time, I've had some Ansible playbooks—most notably ones that would install Docker then start some Docker containers—where I had to split them in two parts, or at least run them twice, because they relied on the control user having a new group assigned for some later tasks.

The problem is, Ansible would connect over SSH to a server, and use that connection for subsequent tasks. If you add a group to the user (e.g. docker), then keep running more tasks, that new group assignment won't be picked up until the SSH connection is reset (similar to how if you're logged in, you'd have to log out and log back in to see your new groups).

The easy fix for this? Add a reset_connection meta task in your play to force Ansible to drop its persistent SSH connection and reconnect to the server:

Ah, the feeling of unpacking a brand new computer:

In my case, I'm actually selling the 16" MacBook Pro pictured above and replacing it with a 13" MacBook Air and 10 Gigabit Mac mini.

Once you turn on the new Mac, what's next? Do you:

I recently got an offer from MacStadium to use one of their dedicated Mac minis to perform CI and testing tasks for my Mac-based open source projects (for example, my Mac Dev Ansible Playbook, which I use to configure my own Macs).

So I thought I'd document a little bit in this blog post about how I configured the Mac mini for more secure remote administration, since Macs tend to be a little more 'open' out of the box than comparable Linux machines that I'm used to working with.

Securing SSH

First of all, I used ssh-copy-id to add my SSH key to the default administrator account on the Mac mini that was created for me:

Over the past four months, I live-streamed a series of episodes covering all the basics of using Ansible for infrastructure automation in my Ansible 101 series on YouTube.

In the last episode of the series, I asked viewers to send in questions that I could answer on the final live stream, and there were many great questions sent in. Some of those questions and my answers are posted below, and you can also view the entire episode in the embedded video below:

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Matias

View this Q&A in the livestream

How do you organize your Ansible tasks? What are the best practices for Ansible?

In late March, as the COVID-19 pandemic hit the US, I decided to make my Ansible books free to help people level-up their skills at home. That offer was generously extended by Device42 in April.

Something happened that I never expected, but in hindsight is pretty amazing: while the books were free, paid sales went up 400%!.

Anyways, in the midst of that, I also realized after getting my equipment in order for live streaming, I could teach a free 'Ansible 101' course on YouTube. So I asked people if they'd be interested, got a very enthusiastic 'YES', and tried to make a concise but somewhat entertaining live series on all things Ansible.

This is the fourth video in a series discussing cluster computing with the Raspberry Pi, and I'm posting the video + transcript to my blog so you can follow along even if you don't enjoy sitting through a video :)

In the last episode, I showed you how to install Kubernetes on the Turing Pi cluster, running on seven Raspberry Pi Compute Modules.

In this episode, I'm going to show you some of the things you can do with the cluster.