I’ve recently been experimenting with Hashicorp’s Consul in my home infrastructure because I want to use it to provide service discovery and automatic DNS provisioning when I create Proxmox instances with Terraform. Consul is a bit of a hefty beast to get to grips with and getting DNS lookups working when you have ACLs enabled can be a little tricky - it’s taken me a day or two of going round in circles to figure this one out....
A solution in need of a problem Like all good sysadmins, my personal website has been a ‘coming soon’ splash page for quite some time. According to the Wayback Machine, it’s been this way since some time in 2014. As I’m sure many can sympathise with, there are always far more interesting and shiny things to be experimenting with than building a website. One of the interesting things I like to experiment with is Kubernetes (as should be apparent from the tag cloud)....
All the choices So you’re looking to start using Kubernetes, but you’re overwhelmed by the multitude of deployment options available? Judging by the length of the Picking the Right Solution section to the Kubernetes docs, it’s safe to assume that you’re not alone. Even after you’ve made it past the provisioning stage, you then need to learn how to administrate what is a very complex system. In short; Kubernetes is not easy....
When you receive a new server, there are a variety of pre-requisites required before Ansible can be used to administrate the host. Below is my own personal playbook which works for both Debian and RedHat (and derivative) systems. --- # ansible-playbook bootstrap-ansible-target.yml -b -e 'user=user' - hosts: "{{ host }}" remote_user: "{{ user | default('root') }}" gather_facts: no pre_tasks: - name: attempt to update apt's cache raw: test -e /usr/bin/apt-get && apt-get update ignore_errors: yes - name: attempt to install Python on Debian-based systems raw: test -e /usr/bin/apt-get && apt-get -y install python-simplejson python ignore_errors: yes - name: attempt to install Python on CentOS-based systems raw: test -e /usr/bin/yum && yum -y install python-simplejson python ignore_errors: yes - setup: tasks: - name: Create admin user group group: name: admin system: yes state: present - name: Ensure sudo is installed package: name: sudo state: present - name: Create Ansible user user: name: ansible shell: /bin/bash comment: "Ansible management user" home: /home/ansible createhome: yes - name: Add Ansible user to admin group user: name: ansible groups: admin append: yes - name: Add authorized key authorized_key: user: ansible state: present key: "{{ lookup('file', '/etc/ansible/....