A Technical I.T./DevOps Blog
Problem scenario
You run an Ansible playbook that uses a variable, but you get the message “fatal: FAILED! ={“msg”: “The conditional check …The error was: error while evaluating conditional (ansible_hostname == ):”. What should you do?
Solution
When testing a variable’s value to another fixed string, put quotes around the string.
Here is an incorrect example of a playbook using such a comparison:
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Problem scenario
You are running an Ansible playbook, but you get the error “this task includes an undefined variable.” Every variable seems to be defined. What is wrong?
Possible solution #1
Do one of the variables rely on an index of server names? If the playbook orchestrates something that responds to Ansible values on other servers and one server is not reachable,
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Problem scenario
You are running an Ansible playbook, but you get an error like this: “IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied…”
How do you get the playbook to work?
Solution
If the playbook has a destination for a file and that file is already there on the managed node, this error may occur.
1. Go to the managed node.
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Problem scenario
You try to run an Ansible playbook but you get this error “AnsibleOptionsError…ansible.cfg…File contains no section headers”
Your ansible.cfg file has headers. What should you do?
Solution
Eliminate indentations. The [header] should be on the far left of the screen with no leading spaces.
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Problem scenario
You want to leverage the CM tool SaltStack. You have Salt Master installed, and now you want to push down files to Salt Minion client servers. How do you do this?
Solution
Prerequisites
This solution requires Salt Master to be configured. If you need assistance, see this posting.
Procedures
1.
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Continue reading “How Do You Use an .sls File to Push down Configuration Changes Using SaltStack?”
Problem scenario
You want to see if an Ansible playbook is injecting (or leaving) two braces, “{{” or “}}”, in a specific file on Linux. These symbols can be injected accidentally with little notification. Variable substitution could fail during the course of a playbook run. This is a subtle problem that may have no alert. You want some debugging to check for these symbols. How do you know a file on a managed node does not have a “{{” or “}}”?
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Continue reading “Using Ansible How Do You Search The Contents of a File on Linux for “{{” or “}}”?”
Problem scenario
You are trying to run an Ansible playbook with the “become: yes” stanza. You get this error after your ansible-playbook command:
“ERROR! Syntax Error while loading YAML.
mapping values are not allowed here
The error appears to have been in ‘/home/cooluser/good.yaml’: line 5, column 10, but may
be elsewhere in the file depending on the exact syntax problem.
The offending line appears to be…”
What should you do?
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Problem scenario
You run ansible-playbook on a playbook (e.g., .yaml file) that uses a role. It fails with the message “ERROR! the role was not found”. How do you correct this problem?
Solution
Find the ansible.cfg file. Look at the roles_path stanza. Add or modify the path that you want Ansible to look at for a role every time the Ansible playbook runs.
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Continue reading “How Do You Troubleshoot the Ansible Message “ERROR! the role was not found”?”
Problem scenario
You have installed Ansible and configured it to work with other servers (managed nodes). You want to write an Ansible playbook that will work with Linux managed nodes with three requirements:
1. Transfer a compressed file from a web sever without wget.
2. Uncompress a .zip file without unzip.
3. Work without passwordless SSH authentication to the managed nodes.
How do you accomplish this with using Ansible-supported features?
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Question
What is GitOps?
Answer
GitOps is a declarative method of managing infrastructure that is driven by committing code into a version control system. GitOps is an indirect, and usually imperative, approach to systems administration that gives a detailed history of past operations. GitOps is the practice of adding code to a Git repository to trigger an operational event (such as rebooting a server, creating a user account,
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