Ansible privilege escalation using ‘sudo su -‘
Privilege Escalation

Recently I wrote an Ansible playbook to extract data from an Informatica PowerCenter repository. The data was then compressed and uploaded into Nexus Repository Manager. I used the command line utility, pmrep, to execute the commands needed to connect to the Informatica repository and to extract the data. A specific Informatica user had been given […]

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Some Ansible Examples
Ansible

When going to a new environment, it would be nice if someone had already thought out the networking and authentication needs. It would be nice if we had a sane DNS solution and a good LDAP server. Regrettably, Life in operations is not always that nice. We are frequently asked to quickly set up a […]

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How to Use Ansible-Container to Build a Docker Container
Container

Last month I talked about the need for Docker-aware configuration management (CM) tools to effectively build and test containers in a CI/CD pipeline. The goal is to not install any extra tooling inside of the docker container that gets published for production use; not sshd, nor any CM tooling. This technical post documents the major […]

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Ansible Tower: Initial Thoughts
Ansible

One of our clients recently wanted to start using Ansible on a project. As part of the new effort we wanted to investigate Ansible Tower as a potential way to use Ansible. This blog is a overview of the thoughts I had and some lessons learned. My next blog will be more specific examples of […]

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My First Ansible Jinja2 Filter

Why would I want to make a Jinja2 filter? While Ansible Modules are the main way you accomplish something in Ansible, Jinja2 Filters are the main way you manipulate data.  The first python code you’ll need to write in ansible is probably because you want to transform some data to send to a module or […]

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Ansible Environment Design — Variable Precedence in Ansible 1 vs 2

Ansible’s immaturity compared to chef/puppet really shows when talking about the prioritized variable loading (facts).  In the chef world we had about 4 different places to store attributes with 3 different priorities.  This ordering is so important for organization and design that this page was one of two pages I had new people read and bookmark […]

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