Ansible Support for Fedora Server core services – Introduction

Peter Boy

Fedora Server is geared towards supporting and simplifying the installation and administration of Core Services using Ansible. This article describes the necessary cross-service preparations. You find the service-specific details in the respective documentation for the individual services.

You are in the Fedora Server documentation staging area!

These documents are not approved yet and may be incomplete and/or incorrect. Take everything here with a grain of salt! You would probably prefer to study the published documentation.

Status of this document: Work in progress

Most importantly, Ansible is an "agent-less" support system. You don’t install supporting software on each of your servers. Instead, the Ansible software, installed on a so-called "control node" knows all about the required installation and administration steps, and log in to a server system, as any administrator would do, and performs the necessary steps by following the appropriate instructions, again just as an administrator would.

Of course, Ansible needs to know what needs to be done. The documentation for the respective services describes how an administrator provides this information for Ansible.

Further important properties are… (TBD).

The upstream project documentation provides a complete overview.

Installing the controle node

Any Linux computer can act as a control node, but MacOS or Windows are also capable of doing so.

Fedora

You can use any Fedora Desktop spin as controle node and also a Fedora Server instance. You don’t need a graphical UI. As an administrator, you can do everything on the command line.

Install the Ansible RPM package.
```
[...]$ sudo dnf install ansible
```
Set up ssh keys

TBD

Set up the directory structure of the Ansible working files. .

TBD

                  Fedora Server Ansible Support
                                 |
             --------------------|-------------------------------------
             |                |             |           |             |
         Inventor(y|ies)    Playbook     Playbook     Playbook      Playbook
                              NFS        WebService     IPA           ....
             |                 |             |           |             |
          -------           -------      -------      -------       -------
          |  |  |           |  |  |      |  |  |      |  |  |       |  |  |
      (inventories)       Files/Roles   Files/Roles  Files/Roles   Files/Roles

Test the setup.

MacOS

TBD

Windows

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