Today, I had a look at the Ansible 101 speak from Luke Sneeringer while I was writing definitions for creating new vms at the different vmware clusters we have. I have ansible start up a new machine, get the mac address and put a configuration in the pxe configuration on a server to define what OS and hostname to give to the new VM.
Ansible was mentioned to me during an interview for a few weeks ago and this really caught my attention. I’ve configured raspberry pi and provisioned servers at digitalocean with it already. I rewrote most of my Chef code to ansible because I found it much easier and more logical. Writing the code when I already is used to Puppet with Hiera and yaml wasn’t hard at all.
I struggle with a few older OS-installed machines which does not have a new enough python required for ansible. I would love to get a statically linked and easy portable version of python with the needed python modules available to run from the homedirectory. I guess I could make one myself if I got time for it, and I guess that I rather install new boxes and move the data there instead of digging into how to do this the “wrong way”.
I found this, but I did not have a compiler on the specific box