The ramblings of a computer geek
When building playbooks and tasks, you may find you want to check the status of a host before you attempt to perform a particular action upon it. You wouldn’t want it to attempt to perform an action which would fail because something is missing, you’d want it to check first. Although you can use conditionals … Read more
Ansible Vault encrypts secret variables or entire YAML files inside the repository. To unlock (see) these at the point of running the Ansible Playbook you need the Vault Password to unlock them. We’re going to create a simple example to illustate how it can be used. Ensure you have added the SSH Key to your … Read more
I was getting the following error with Ansible when running a Playbook against a server: It turned out that Ansible was attempting to perform an “apt update” and failing, but just ended up timing out. Manually running “apt update” then gave the following error, which was what was tripping up the Playbook and causing it … Read more
You can obtain information from a Virtual Machine via its VMTools service via the VMware PowerCLI, here is a simple working example you can build from to determine ID 1808 which shows that the machine has successfully completed its Secure Boot remediation (i.e. installing the new 2023 certificates to NVRAM and swapping to the new … Read more
Quick reference for Terraform when using AWS. Once you are authenticated, i’m assuming SSO here, then you can apply your configuration with: You can add the “–auto-approve” to the end so you don’t have to press “yes”, but use with caution!
Some commands you can use to clean up running containers and your images. Remove any containers, its recommended to verify if they are stopped first with “docker ps -a”: Remove all the images: In my case I had a couple of images that needed to be force removed, you can’t remove images with the above … Read more
Was installing Node.js v25.9.0 as a standalone pre-built binary installation and ended up after a successful installation getting the following when attempting to run a “node -v”. To resolve this, I just needed to install the missing library. Then attempting to re-run the command, I get the version output as expected.
Although there are a few ways to do it, here is an example of how you can use the null_resource to make Terraform wait for an EC2 instance to be ready before continuning. In this example we have an EC2 instance called mgmt_host which will using the “trigger” set the Terraform into a loop to … Read more
So you have an EC2 instance you’ve deployed from Terraform, but as part of the run of your template you want to run some other commands. Sure, you can use the “user data” section to run commands at deployment time, but what if you want to run something later on? Well, you can use a … Read more
A simple VPC deployment pattern which includes a simple configuration that has been tested and can be used to build a new infrastructure from. It uses Terraform and uses local state storage (within a directory called “state_data”), for production uses it is mandated to use some form of remote state storage. The pattern within the … Read more