The link below points to a Prezi presentation I drafted to champion Ansible automation at my organization. It assumes very little previous knowledge about Ansible and could be used as a gentle ‘first steps’ intro for your admin team before making the deep dive into playbook authoring. https://prezi.com/view/M0ws3yrVg7f1XkWFZlnS/

Ansible is a powerful automation tool for Linux. It operates on the philosophy of anything you can do via SSH you can automate with Ansible. It comes ‘batteries included’ with hundreds of pre-built modules which allow the overwhelmed administrator to accomplish nearly any task across a bevy of remote machines (including Windows machines if necessary). […]

Ansible provides an automated means of performing nearly any administrative function against a list of any number of RHEL or CentOS servers in your managed environment. As with local administration, some tasks, such as viewing a configuration file, require only user level permissions, when other administration tasks, such as user creation, require elevated permissions. Where […]

I’ve added a short bash script that will return the IP address of a running KVM virtual machine. I needed this because I usually ssh into my physical host from a laptop while sitting on my couch and then ssh over into my VMs. This script automates my usual of dumping of the VM’s xml […]

It is possible to configure a RHEL or CentOS server as an iSCSI initiator (a.k.a. client), or as an iSCSI target (a.k.a. server). Typically, a server will be configured as a client to a NAS or SAN device however it is absolutely possible to share a logical volume, partition, or entire disk via iSCSI. Configuring […]

When I had my computer stolen out of my home it wasn’t the machine I missed. My boxes usually have pretty unspectacular specs. I did however miss the data. Even the policy number I needed to give to the insurance company to report the loss was in my Documents directory on a drive in a […]

Keeping all of your server’s installed packages up to date is paramount to system security even if the server is physically isolated from the internet. On an internet-connected server or workstation staying up to date is as easy is issuing the ‘yum update’ or ‘dnf update’ command from a privilege-elevated shell prompt. Updating a RHEL […]

In RHEL7 it is possible to bind two or more network interfaces together to enhance fault-tolerance or to increase throughput. Bonding is the tried and true method for making this happen but teaming, which employs the teamd service provides a new way to aggregate interfaces. Both ways of going about this are valid for the […]

The age of the floppy disk might have come and gone but the format still has its uses… 3.5″ 1.44MB floppy disks can still be had. An Amazon search performed at the time of this writing returned pages of results. However they appear to have gone back up in price, with the least expensive offering […]

I was playing with dialog, the nCurses-like packages that allows one to create Text User Interfaces (TUI) for bash scripts. I banged out a TUI that allows a firewalld user to reload and then view firewall changes after editing them with firewall-cmd. You can download it from: https://github.com/linuxhistoryblg/adminscripts set it executable and place it anywhere […]