Tag: ansible

Automatically deploy pfSense with Terraform and Ansible

Luca Dell'Oca, March 13, 2024March 27, 2024

My vSphere Lab has multiple networks, and even if I have NSX available, I usually prefer the simplicity of a small virtual appliance that acts as the firewall to securely connect all those networks, simulating a secure environment. I always used pfSense for this scope, as it is very powerful and yet very simple to use. I need to focus my lab time on things I need for my job, so the quickness of pfSense has always been an advantage. From time to time I need to rebuild my lab, and even if I have some configuration backups to restore pfSense, I wanted to see if I could automate the deployment and configuration of my pfSense appliance.
I was able to automate 99% of the process. Here’s how.

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My Automated Lab project: #3 Create a Windows Server 2019 template in VMware vSphere with Packer

Luca Dell'Oca, October 3, 2023September 26, 2023

In my previous post I’ve created a Ubuntu template into VMware vSphere using Packer. Time to build now a Microsoft Windows template.

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My Automated Lab project: #2 Create a Ubuntu template in VMware vSphere with Packer

Luca Dell'Oca, September 26, 2023September 23, 2023

In my previous post I explained the tools I use in my lab automation. Today, we’ll talk about creating Ubuntu templates into VMware vSphere. For this, I will use Packer.

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My Automated Lab project: #1 Install and configure the needed tools

Luca Dell'Oca, September 19, 2023September 18, 2023

Raise your hand if you love to rebuild everytime your home lab manually! Noone, right? you either end up trying to not breaking it, thus defeating the purpose of the lab, or you spend insame amount of hours to fix it everytime, or to rebuilding it from scratch. So, automation in our home labs has always been a huge topic, and there are around many posts in these regards. So, why my own version? Because I found around some posts that I used to create my own automation, but none of them was perfect for my needs. I love beers, so let me use this example: like an home brewer (which I’m not, by the way) during this year I made my own recipe. It may not be the best one around, but it’s my own personal recipe. If you find it useful too, be my guest!

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Manage automatic kerberos login in Ansible for Active Directory accounts

Luca Dell'Oca, October 25, 2016December 4, 2016

In the previous posts I’ve started to show you some of the possible uses of Ansible, in particular some example for managing Windows machines. As I’ve explained in the first post about Ansible, the software can login into any Windows machine using both local or domain users. In the latter case,…

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Patching windows servers with Ansible

Luca Dell'Oca, October 18, 2016December 4, 2016

After I configured my Ansible server to manage my windows machines in the previous article, one of the first tasks I planned to automate was patching. Patching is one of those extremely boring but needed activities, and in any environment, even with a small amount of server, automated patching may be a savior. As long as proper data protection is in place, like a daily backup of the involved virtual machines, we can safely plan automatic updates, and if anything goes wrong, we just need to revert the virtual machine to the previous state.

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Configuring Windows machines for Ansible

Luca Dell'Oca, October 11, 2016December 4, 2016

As I’m studying Ansible, one of my goal is to manage my several Windows machines with it. I know it sounds strange as Ansible was first designed to deal with Linux systems, but this powerful configuration management platform supports Windows since version 1.7, and is completely agentless: it relies on SSH for linux/unix machines, and Windows Remote Management (WinRM) for Windows machines. Through WinRM, Ansible can connect to Windows machines ard run PowerShell scripts. The idea of using Powershell as the main code to execute tasks in Windows systems, together with the agentless approach, made me be even more curious in learning more about the Windows support.