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 . . .
Once upon a time I used to rely on nothing but a Secure Shell for access to my internal network, however this became more and more impractical the more things I stood up on the network and the more things I needed access to from my phone the less time I spent carrying a laptop with me. Given my long time favouritism for OpenVPN and how much the platform had . . .
My personal infrastructure has gone through a number of iterations. Starting as a 450mhz Pentium 3 Ubuntu 7.04 server running SMB on a single 5400 RPM IDE disk cobbled together through a BT home hub and some cheap megabit switches, it later became an Ubuntu 14.06 host on a laptop with a broken screen and gigabit switches, then a Pentium 4 desktop and then a lightweight Gigabyte Brix mini-PC before . . .
Netbox is an incredible tool and I’ll happily say I don’t know how I worked before I was introduced to it, scrabbling around in leviathan (non version controlled) spreadsheets and SharePoint pages that try to perform IP address management, or even worse the notes on a scrap of paper or book on someone’s desk. There are other tools on the market, but they cost an arm and a leg for . . .
One of Ansible’s most brilliant features is Privilege Escalation, the ability to enter the context of a more privileged user following an initial connection to either your local or remote node, however a bizarre little caveat in Tower I haven’t been able find documented anywhere and it refers to the use of a system account (by default named awx) on the localhost. What Is AWX Anyway? Floating around all over . . .
I’m starting a blog about DevOps tools and technology, aimed at people who can’t work out how this stuff works and find the documentation and concepts impenetrable. After a while of teaching myself I’m starting to realise that it isn’t just me that’s struggling to figure stuff out and there’s a lot of people that don’t want to admit that they don’t understand things. I’m not sure how this is . . .