fedora

For many of my Ansible playbooks and roles, I have CI tests which run over various distributions, including CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora. Many of my Docker Hub images for Ansible testing include systemd so I can test services that are installed inside. For the most part, systemd-related issues are rare, but it seems with Fedora and DNF, I often encounter random test failures which invariably have an error message like:

No such file or directory: '/var/lib/dnf/rpmdb_lock.pid'

The full Ansible traceback is:

I wanted to document this process on my blog, since it's the second time I've had to do it, and it always takes me way longer to figure it out than it should... basically, here's how you can take a laptop with a hard disk that's running an older version of Fedora (in my case, Fedora 23), use the Fedora install media to re-partition the drive, then install a newer version of Fedora (in my case, Fedora 26):

From time to time, there's a security patch or other update that's critical to apply ASAP to all your servers. If you use Ansible to automate infrastructure work, then updates are painless—even across dozens, hundreds, or thousands of instances! I've written about this a little bit in the past, in relation to protecting against the shellshock vulnerability, but that was specific to one package.

I have an inventory script that pulls together all the servers I manage for personal projects (including the server running this website), and organizes them by OS, so I can run commands like ansible [os] command. Then that enables me to run commands like: