Book Image

Ansible Quick Start Guide

By : Mohamed Alibi
Book Image

Ansible Quick Start Guide

By: Mohamed Alibi

Overview of this book

Configuration Management (CM) tools help administrators reduce their workload. Ansible is one of the best Configuration Management tools, and can act as an orchestrator for managing other CMs. This book is the easiest way to learn how to use Ansible as an orchestrator and a Configuration Management tool. With this book, you will learn how to control and monitor computer and network infrastructures of any size,physical or virtual. You will begin by learning about the Ansible client-server architecture. To get started, you will set up and configure an Ansible server. You will then go through the major features of Ansible: Playbook and Inventory. Then, we will look at Ansible systems and network modules. You will then use Ansible to enable infrastructure automated configuration management, followed by best practices for using Ansible roles and community modules. Finally, you will explore Ansible features such as Ansible Vault, Ansible Containers, and Ansible plugins.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Linux client node configuration


The only important tool that is required to be installed and running on the client machine is  the OpenSSH-server. All new releases of Linux use SSH as the main remote access method by default.

To make sure that everything is in place, the SSH service should always be running and the system's firewall should allow a port for SSH to service through. By default, this is port 22. This can be changed, however, and this change should be also noted in the host Ansible inventory.

For Linux clients, any extra configuration for Ansible management is more aimed at following best practice guidelines than being strictly necessary. Extra configuration can be a way to make sure that the remote clients managed by Ansible are fully automated, securely accessible, and do not require an admin intervention when running automated tasks.

Note

The following configuration is optional—you can choose what suits you. Add the configurations that you think will be useful and ignore the others...