Book Image

Security Automation with Ansible 2

By : Akash Mahajan, MADHU AKULA
Book Image

Security Automation with Ansible 2

By: Akash Mahajan, MADHU AKULA

Overview of this book

Security automation is one of the most interesting skills to have nowadays. Ansible allows you to write automation procedures once and use them across your entire infrastructure. This book will teach you the best way to use Ansible for seemingly complex tasks by using the various building blocks available and creating solutions that are easy to teach others, store for later, perform version control on, and repeat. We’ll start by covering various popular modules and writing simple playbooks to showcase those modules. You’ll see how this can be applied over a variety of platforms and operating systems, whether they are Windows/Linux bare metal servers or containers on a cloud platform. Once the bare bones automation is in place, you’ll learn how to leverage tools such as Ansible Tower or even Jenkins to create scheduled repeatable processes around security patching, security hardening, compliance reports, monitoring of systems, and so on. Moving on, you’ll delve into useful security automation techniques and approaches, and learn how to extend Ansible for enhanced security. While on the way, we will tackle topics like how to manage secrets, how to manage all the playbooks that we will create and how to enable collaboration using Ansible Galaxy. In the final stretch, we’ll tackle how to extend the modules of Ansible for our use, and do all the previous tasks in a programmatic manner to get even more powerful automation frameworks and rigs.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Introduction to Ansible Playbooks and Roles
5
Automating Web Application Security Testing Using OWASP ZAP

WordPress on Windows 


This is one of the new things we are going to perform now. Until now, we have been setting up things in Linux based operating systems. Now we are going to set up IIS web server in the Windows operating system, which requires that we enable the WinRM feature in Windows services to perform Ansible playbook execution.

We need to make sure that the pywinrm module is installed in the control machine; we can install it by executing the following pip command:

pip install "pywinrm>=0.2.2"

How to enable WinRM in Windows

To simplify this process, Ansible provides a PowerShell script, which needs to be run as an administrator in the PowerShell console. Download the PowerShell script from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ansible/ansible/devel/examples/scripts/ConfigureRemotingForAnsible.ps1.

On a Windows machine, open the command prompt as an administrator and run the following command:

powershell.exe -File ConfigureRemotingForAnsible.ps1 -CertValidityDays 100

 

Note

Make sure you opened...