In this post: What is Ansible Installing Ansible Authentication Inventories Playbooks Testing Ansible What is Ansible? Ansible is an open-source infrastructure as code tool provided by Red Hat. Instead of agents, Ansible relies on SSH to pass tasks defined in YAML to remote machines. To get familiar with Ansible, I created a simple scenario where a bash script needed to be uploaded to a remote machine and ran periodically. ...
Kubernetes provides a framework to orchestrate multiple containers, verses working with one container at a time. To practice managing containers I opted to build a Kubernetes cluster on Raspberry Pis using Rancher. Rancher came about soon after Docker introduced containers to the market, and provides an open-source platform for enterprises to easily use Kubernetes in their environment. K3S is a Rancher product that allows you to deploy a Kubernetes cluster using a single binary file thats less than 40MB. K3S is ideal for Raspberry Pis, since traditionally building a Kubernetes cluster on Pis could be too much for them to handle. In addition to K3S this is what I used to build a simple Kubernetes cluster in my home lab: ...
Introduction to Terraform Terraform by Hashicorp is a “tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently”. Terraform works using infrastructure as code, meaning that build a blueprint of the resources you need in a configuration file (with the .tf extension) and Terraform builds that infrastructure for you. The Terraform package itself is a single binary file, easily downloaded, and is used to build/edit/destroy your resources. In contrast to older versions of infrastructure build tools like Packer, Terraform allows you to create infrastructure across multiple cloud providers and is “smart” enough to know how many more machines to create in context of what you already have. For example, if you have 5 servers on Azure, but you want 10, Terraform will build 5 more for you to bring you to a total of 10 versus building 10 more servers and leaving you with 15. ...
Practicing installing/updating/building machines is much more fun when you aren’t running the risk of ruining an entire computer. To give myself a safe environment to work in, I have been using VMware’s vSphere in our home lab for many of my computer projects. vSphere is a suite of virtualization products that allow you to create and manage VMs. This allows me to work on VMs that can run any OS I like, and if I something goes wrong I can just delete the VM and begin again. ...
Arch Linux’s official website describes Arch as a distribution that “tries to Keep It Simple”. It also states that Arch is not for those without the ability or time for a “do-it-yourself” system–which is true. I recently built a machine that needed a lightweight OS, so Arch Linux was a good choice. Installing Arch Linux can seem complicated, but understanding what needs to happen in each step of the install makes it feel fun and easy. Here’s what I did: ...
For the home-lab, we used the following devices: Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X Ubiquiti UniFi 24 port switch 2 VMware ESXi Hosts A Synology NAS DS420j (Diskstation) Building the home lab also required quite a few patch cables to connect devices, and I made most of them myself. This required UTP cable, plastic clips for the ends, a cable crimping tool, and a lot of patience. The arrangement of the wires, or the pinout, had to be in a specific order. ...