Ansible Server Management/ Administration

plumberg

Hi ya'll,
I am wondering I'd anyone using Ansible for Server mgmt and admin?

I am mainly looking to try and keep my idling servers hardened and secure, nothing more.

I plan to use Centos/ Debian and Windows servers...

If yes, could someone share some pointers / playbooks to get started?

Thanks in advance!

RickBakkr

I do! It's great.

I have found the only way to make Ansible suit your own environment, is to write own playbooks. Once you get the hang of its inner workings and the YAML syntaxis, it's really easy to write :-)

tjn

– Jeff Geerling's roles on Github are a great resource to both use and learn from.
Really helped me out when I was starting my Ansible journey - still does.

– For security, Devsec's baseline roles/playbooks are really good. Check out their ansible collection on Github. I use these a lot.

– Ansible Galaxy is convenient when looking for a particular role.

– The Ansible docs are sometimes overly complicated, but they're pretty good.

– This cheat sheet comes in handy too.

– r/Ansible is a good place to read about how others handle certain things. Even if it isn't related to what I'm doing, or trying to achieve.

Over on YouTube:

– The Digital Life Channel has some good tutorials for beginners. He's fun to watch and makes it easy to follow.

– Also good for beginners is this Techno Tim video

Have you written any playbooks yet?

plumberg

@RickBakkr said:
I do! It's great.

I have found the only way to make Ansible suit your own environment, is to write own playbooks. Once you get the hang of its inner workings and the YAML syntaxis, it's really easy to write :-)

Thanks for sharing! Definitely interested in playing around

plumberg

@tjn said:
– Jeff Geerling's roles on Github are a great resource to both use and learn from.
Really helped me out when I was starting my Ansible journey - still does.

– For security, Devsec's baseline roles/playbooks are really good. Check out their ansible collection on Github. I use these a lot.

– Ansible Galaxy is convenient when looking for a particular role.

– The Ansible docs are sometimes overly complicated, but they're pretty good.

– This cheat sheet comes in handy too.

– r/Ansible is a good place to read about how others handle certain things. Even if it isn't related to what I'm doing, or trying to achieve.

Over on YouTube:

– The Digital Life Channel has some good tutorials for beginners. He's fun to watch and makes it easy to follow.

– Also good for beginners is this Techno Tim video

Have you written any playbooks yet?

This is a wealth of information. Thank you so much for so kindly sharing these resources. I think I have my work cut out for the weekend!

TimboJones

@plumberg said:
Hi ya'll,
I am wondering I'd anyone using Ansible for Server mgmt and admin?

I am mainly looking to try and keep my idling servers hardened and secure, nothing more.

I plan to use Centos/ Debian and Windows servers...

If yes, could someone share some pointers / playbooks to get started?

Thanks in advance!

Ultra hardening:
Linux: shutdown -t now
Windows: shutdown -s -t1

plumberg

@TimboJones said:

@plumberg said:
Hi ya'll,
I am wondering I'd anyone using Ansible for Server mgmt and admin?

I am mainly looking to try and keep my idling servers hardened and secure, nothing more.

I plan to use Centos/ Debian and Windows servers...

If yes, could someone share some pointers / playbooks to get started?

Thanks in advance!

Ultra hardening:
Linux: shutdown -t now
Windows: shutdown -s -t1

pbx

@TimboJones said: Linux: shutdown -t now
Windows: shutdown -s -t1

Best idling. Keeps hackers at bay and let people who actually want to use their VPSes benefit from as much resources as possible.

BradND

I do, but it becomes absolutely awful in large environments

ericls

I use sensible to setup my k8s cluster and manage deployments

txtag1

@tjn said:
– Jeff Geerling's roles on Github are a great resource to both use and learn from.
Really helped me out when I was starting my Ansible journey - still does.

– For security, Devsec's baseline roles/playbooks are really good. Check out their ansible collection on Github. I use these a lot.

– Ansible Galaxy is convenient when looking for a particular role.

– The Ansible docs are sometimes overly complicated, but they're pretty good.

– This cheat sheet comes in handy too.

– r/Ansible is a good place to read about how others handle certain things. Even if it isn't related to what I'm doing, or trying to achieve.

Over on YouTube:

– The Digital Life Channel has some good tutorials for beginners. He's fun to watch and makes it easy to follow.

– Also good for beginners is this Techno Tim video

Have you written any playbooks yet?

This is very helpful