Ansible is IT automation, made simple.
Fedora
Our Home Server is doing some nice stuff already. With the last articles, I want to demonstrate how you can deploy some useful applications on it. Running your own Git server has some advantages, when it comes to private work or testing.
Fedora
With the release of Fedora Linux 37, I switched back to Fedora Silverblue. I took this opportunity to revamp my Fedora Workstation repository and therefore my Ansible playbook for the same.
Fedora
In the last article of our Home Server series, we tackled the deployment of a timeserver. This also provided us with some useful tooling to set up more container deployments. Let's continue on this approach and tackle DNS and DHCP.
Home
Phew, that took a while to get right. I don't want to waste any more of your valuable time. So, let's dig into the deployment of a time, DHCP and DNS server on our home server. Shall we?
Ansible
Let's assume you have a playbook, but you want to use different values for your variables for each time you run it. For example, you want to create a new user on your machines or change the playbook behavior. This can be done, and it is very easy with Ansible Prompts.
Fedora
In the last articles we tackled virtualization, which is perfectly fine, if you want to run full-fledged virtual machines. On the other hand, you can use containers to deploy workloads very easily. So, let's have a look how we can integrate this in our home server.
Ansible
In the previous part of this article, we had a look at Ansible Roles and how you can use them. Now, let's develop a role on our own. It's really a piece of cake.
Fedora
In the previous article, we introduced virtualization to our home server. This allows us to start virtual machines with different operating systems. The combination of libvirt, KVM and Cockpit also allows us to create virtual machines with a graphical frontend.
Fedora
Virtualization opens a wide variety of possibilities. If you want to test a new OS release or set up some special workload, a Virtual Machine can be used easily.
Ansible
Let's do Ansible, they said. Writing simple playbooks is easy, they said. But, should one really write playbooks over and over again? Repeat yourself? Not at all, for sure. Automation is about avoiding repetition, and Ansible has some concepts to address this.
Linux
Concept done, Hardware done, started with automation and now? Sure, we want to make the new home server manageable. I want to see errors, updates, performance data at a glance and configure some minor things ad-hoc. This article is exactly about this addition to our home server.
Home
In the Fedora - Home Server series, we are looking into setting up and automating our Home Server deployment. The last two articles introduced you to the concept, hardware and operating system. This time, we will set up our automation and do the first tasks.
Home
Just a few days ago, somebody reached out to me and asked: Daniel, how do you do your home server? Since this question is not really easy to answer, I will provide a series of articles, that will enable you to set up your own home server.
Spotlight
Cirrus CLI is a tool for running containerized tasks reproducibly in any environment. Most commonly, Cirrus tasks are used as part of continuous integration workflows but can also be used as part of local development process as a hermetic replacement of helper scripts/Makefiles.
Ansible
You have done your automation in Ansible? Cool! But do you test, if the deployment really works? Do you check if your server is really listening to the correct port and delivers the correct content? This guide will dig into functional testing with Ansible...
Ansible
Ansible can be used to configure and orchestrate a bunch of machines. As explained in a previous article, it is quite easy to write and maintain a simple inventory. Now let's add some variables to it, so we can maintain our infrastructure settings in a central place.