Book Image

Hands-On Enterprise Automation on Linux

By : James Freeman
Book Image

Hands-On Enterprise Automation on Linux

By: James Freeman

Overview of this book

Automation is paramount if you want to run Linux in your enterprise effectively. It helps you minimize costs by reducing manual operations, ensuring compliance across data centers, and accelerating deployments for your cloud infrastructures. Complete with detailed explanations, practical examples, and self-assessment questions, this book will teach you how to manage your Linux estate and leverage Ansible to achieve effective levels of automation. You'll learn important concepts on standard operating environments that lend themselves to automation, and then build on this knowledge by applying Ansible to achieve standardization throughout your Linux environments. By the end of this Linux automation book, you'll be able to build, deploy, and manage an entire estate of Linux servers with higher reliability and lower overheads than ever before.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Section 1: Core Concepts
5
Section 2: Standardizing Your Linux Servers
10
Section 3: Day-to-Day Management
16
Section 4: Securing Your Linux Servers

Enforcing and auditing configuration

When it comes to user account management, security is important. As we discussed in the section entitled Centralizing user account management with LDAP, Ansible is not designed specifically for enforcement or auditing— however, it can help us greatly. Let's consider a few of the security risks around user management that Ansible can help to mitigate, starting with the sudoers file.

Managing sudoers with Ansible

The /etc/sudoers file is one of the most sensitive on most Linux systems, as it defines which user accounts can run commands as the superuser. Needless to say, this file being compromised or modified in an unauthorized way could pose a huge security risk to not just the...