a blog about network automation
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Running Ansible Playbooks safely
A good way to explicitly and dynamically control which inventory hosts or groups a playbook executes against is by defining the host’s field in the playbook as a variable, commonly named “target”. This variable is then defined as an extra vars each time you run the playbook, and if you forget it the playbook will…
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Neovim vs Vim
I started in Vim, but after a while, I replaced Vim with Neovim. I find that Neovim has more sensible defaults, “looks” better, and has good Language Server Protocol (LSP) integration and syntax highlighting plugins. I also prefer the Lua configuration setup in Neovim compared to Vim and Vimscript, even though I don’t do a…
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Vim movements
These are pretty much the keys I use to move around in Vim (or Neovim). Key Explanation h Move the cursor left. j Move the cursor down. k Move the cursor up. l Move the cursor right. gg Go to the first line of the document. G Go to the last line of the document…
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Tmux commands
Tmux is a terminal multiplexer and I can’t imagine working in a terminal without it. Here is a list of commands I most frequently use. Please note that the “prefix” will depend on your Tmux dotfiles (the default is ctrl+b). Command Explanation tmux ls List active sessions. tmux new -s example Create and connect to…
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Ansible Navigator intro
Ansible Navigator is a text-based command-line version of AAP/AWX (with some limitations), and I use it to test and troubleshoot newly created execution environments. Ansible Navigator can be installed with pip. Once installed, create an ansible-navigator.yml configuration file, and point to the execution environment image, along with your inventory and ansible.cfg file. Then run a…
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Ansible commands
Table with Ansible commands I use often: Command Explanation $ ansible-playbook playbook.yml -i ~/inventory/production -e “target=host1” Run a playbook with some common options. $ ansible-vault encrypt_string ‘secret’ –name ‘foobar’ Encrypt a variable. $ ansible localhost -m debug -a var=’foobar’ -e ‘@inventory/group_vars/all/foobar.yml’ Decrypt a variable. $ ansible-inventory –list -i ./inventory/production Parse the inventory. $ ansible-galaxy collection…
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Helpful Vim commands
Vim has a lot of built-in commands that are very helpful. The following table lists commands I tend to use often. However, this is not even the tip of the command iceberg Vim offers. Command Explanation :%s/foo/bar/g Replace all instances of “foo” with “bar”. :g/foobar/d Delete all lines containing “foobar”. d$ Delete the current line…
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Legacy SSH key exchange workaround
Cisco switches sometimes last longer than their cryptographic algorithms. You can fix this by purchasing a new switch (dah) or by enabling the old, and most likely weak, key exchange algorithm for the affected hosts in ~/.ssh/config.
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Ansible Builder intro
Ansible Builder is a Python tool used to build execution environments for AAP/AWX. An execution environment is a container acting as the Ansible Controller Node and is a required component in AAP/AWX. To get started, install Ansible Builder with pip, and make sure you have Podman/Docker installed, as Ansible Builder depends on a containerization tool.…
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Workflow thoughts
My workflow is centered around the terminal where my main drivers are bash, tmux, and neovim. A lot of time has been invested into this workflow by exploring, writing, and optimizing dotfiles and key bindings. The result of this investment is a keyboard-driven workflow that requires very little mental overhead while also providing familiar ground…