Submitted 2 days ago by Cyber@feddit.uk to selfhosted@lemmy.world
I have a few VMs and PMs around the house that I’d setup over time and I’d now like to rebuild some, not to mention just simplify the whole lot.
How the hell do I get from a working system to an equivalent ansible playbook without many (MANY) iterations of trial & error - and potentially destroying the running system??
Ducking around didn’t really show much so I’m either missing a concept / keyword, or, no-one does this.
Pointers?
TIA
What I did to get rid of my mess, was to containerize service after service using podman. I mount all volumes in a unified location and define all containers as quadlets (systemd services). My backup therefore consists of the base directory where all my container volumes live in subdirectories and the directory with the systemd units for the quadlets.
That way I was able to slowly unify my setup without risking to break all at once. Plus, I can easily replicate it on any server that has podman.
Do you have a GitHub repo? As I am building my system like this and was thinking of exactly using Podman and quadlets.
No, I keep that private to minimize the information I leak about what I host, sorry. (I also don’t do git-ops for my server; I back the mentioned directories up via kopia so in case of recovery I just restore the last working state of data+config. I don’t have much need to version the configs.)
I went through this about 6 months ago.
Just build playbooks from basic to specific. I did so in three parts:
Ansible assumes you have a hierarchy of roles to apply for each service, so layering playbooks this way should help
You will need many iterations of trial and error. No way.
You can speed up testing your playbook by using molecule or something similar. Don’t touch your working VMs until you get a service set up correctly in your test environment. If you need to set up multiple services in a single VM, you can automate their deployment sequentially, of course.
P. S. I don’t like Ansible and won’t recommend it because it is full of bugs and non-obvious behavior. However I didn’t investigate alternatives and can’t suggest a better one.
Could you elaborate a little bit about “full of bugs” and “non-obvious behaviour”? I use Ansible at work for a couple of years already and never encountered anything like that. (I have about 10 playbooks, about 30 roles, about 20 linux servers that I administer)
Same question. But with 100s of playbooks, and thousands of servers. This feels like someone had a bad experience with their first 30 minutes of ansible and gave up before looking at the command reference.
No, I can’t. I use it only occasionally, so I don’t remember everything. But many times configurations didn’t work as described in documentation and I had to find a different way to achieve a required result. Sometimes this behavior changed from release to release. This thing doesn’t seem something that I can rely on. But we use it in our company many years, so switch to another tool would be painful.
afaik, there’s no way “convert” a running system into a playbook. I’d recommend looking at what your systems have in common (installed packages, timezone etc…) and create playbooks based on that and work your way up from there.
Yeah, at least others are confirming what I had assumed, rather than everyone pointing me to a blindingly obvious tool that did it all for me!
Ducking around
giggle
Treat your current setup as your production server. Clone it first, and avoid making any changes directly to production. Any planned changes should ideally be tested on your clone or a pre-production environment first.
As far as I know, there’s no automated way to scan your existing system and generate Ansible playbooks for you. It’s a good habit to document every change you make to a system, ideally in a wiki or something similar, so you can refer back to it later. This is usually done in business environments, but it can be especially helpful if you haven’t run into a situation like this before.
For home use, I like to find roles or collections for common tasks on Ansible Galaxy or GitHub. These are often maintained by others and usually support multiple distributions. The downside is that they might not work for you unless you’re using a mainstream distro like Ubuntu or Debian.
If I were you, I’d make a list of all the services you need (Docker, NGINX, etc.), then search for roles on Ansible Galaxy sorted by download count. Use those to build a fresh server, and try to export your data from the old one to the new one. This is usually the easiest and least time-consuming approach, assuming your distributions are compatible.
Unless you’re genuinely interested in infrastructure automation, writing playbooks by hand will be tedious and time-consuming. Save that as a last resort.
Ok, good point on not writing from scratch - which is what I had been doing for the first few… whixh is rewarding to learn how it works, but it is slow.
Thanks
bushvin@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I would copy the existing system onto a new system:
Anyhow this will take some iterations, but while you have a copy of your ‘production’ system, you can test on your ‘test’ machine until you have the same functionality.
Cyber@feddit.uk 2 days ago
Hmm, that’s not a bad shout actually…
I can fire up VMs to replicate the real system and maybe (depending on space) keep them as a testbed for future mods.
Thanks, good idea.
bushvin@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I have my moments… 😉 Feel free to pm me if you need more advice.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
oh the find with the hash sum is good advice! I would have done this but manually, maybe with the double commander sync dirs tool.
but also, for configs this might be the best time to move your custom config to ordered dropin files for all things that support it.