Following my look at integrating Ansible Tower with Windows, I thought I’d take a look at another common requirement that needs some slight tweaking (though not nearly to the extent of Windows), networking devices, specifically Cisco devices running IOS, ASA and NX-OS platforms. Networking – It’s Built In Unlike the additional layers of configuration that comes with Windows, the use of Cisco platforms is native to Ansible, however some steps . . .
Since the release of Ansible 1.7, way back in the forgotten era of 2014, Ansible can connect to Windows (2008 and higher) using remote PowerShell over that most finicky of mechanisms, WinRM. Red Hat are quick to sell the unilateral management capabilities of Ansible (which do exist), but under the hood we see a uniquely Windows problem. Ansible was built for SSH initially and because Microsoft as ever adopt a . . .
Secure Shell might be the greatest component of Linux and the best gem to come from the Open Source community, enabling countless systems to connect to one-another and allowing the secure communication of systems both manually and programmatically with very little complexity, yet despite this people still appear to struggle with it, especially admins from a Windows background. Keys Vs Passwords There’s a significant downside to using a username and . . .
Outside of the tools, technology and other bells and whistles of the DevOps mindset are the concepts of CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery). Getting to grips with this mentality and the tools used to implement it can be a challenge but not one that needs to take a lifetime, especially not if you’ve been observing some sensible behaviour out of the gate. A multitude of tools claim to have . . .
I’m just going to throw it out there, I love working with security, cryptography and certificates. it wasn’t always that way and like a lot of people I used to recoil in horror of the idea of having to work with certificates. In my experience that’s not an uncommon scenario to be in, it’s almost a universally loathed task to have to work with certs and it boils down to . . .
If you’re anything like me, you probably spent years hearing about the wonders of containerisation and didn’t know where to start. Docker, Kubernetes, Swarm, ECS, App Services and Containers are thrown around as almost interchangeable terms and to the uninitiated it’s just another wall of terms that means nothing (spoiler: the terms aren’t interchangeable and Docker isn’t the only game in town, it’s just the most popular form of container). . . .
UPDATE: At the time I wrote this the Netbox Collection was still pretty immature, it isn’t anymore. If you’re trying to do a simple task then you probably just want to go and install the Netbox Collection from Ansible Galaxy and use the native Modules. You can find the Collection here! Ansible Tower and Netbox are two of my favourite tools, and their integration is seemingly painless on the surface . . .
In working with the Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations APIs a couple of things became apparent quickly, the first is that the documentation is pretty dreadful, the second is that the documentation makes wild assumptions about other technologies and is geared directly towards developers. Having come from a sysadmin background this created a problem that a lot of us have had to deal with. It seems unreasonable to complain that . . .
This project came from the back of my desire to learn more about public key certificates ahead of deploying a two tier PKI for an enterprise network, ahead of this I thought it would be prudent to try something a little smaller scale and see how the nuts and bolts worked and try and deploy a simple single tier PKI at home and see how it could be leveraged. Cryptography . . .
After seeing this configuration deployed in enterprise I struggled to understand how it worked, so I picked up a UniFi AC-AP access point second hand and set around seeing how to do it using open source platforms. Knowing that this required a certificate authority to work and RADIUS I figured I could eventually get it to work, but having never used RADIUS to any great degree it wasn’t without it’s . . .