2025-09-26 –, A211
Configuration management and automation tools, like ansible, can make the life of a system administrator easier both by being able to scale operations as well as help in reproducible create new deployments.
An additional advantage is that the automation will, if done consistently will also document all steps done to create the systems.
This Tutorial will focus on more advanced features of ansible to administrate FreeBSD machines and how to control the enviroment as to get functional identical results:
* installing freebsd-updates
* installing and updating packages
* configuring rc.conf
* modifying/managing config files
* using the included templating engine to generate (even complex) files.
* using dynamic inventory to get the information for the new system out of existing systems already describing the desired state of your systems, for which we will use netbox as an example in the lab environment.
Attendees will need a laptop with an SSH client to access the virtual lab environment and should ideally have basic knowledge on how to run ansible and building a basic playbook.
I'm a sysadmin working with Linux systems for ~25 years and FreeBSD for ~10 years in production systems.
Since about 10 years i'm using ansible to automate the mangment of systems i'm responsible for.