Ansible Collection - adfinis.maintenance

This Ansible collection provides a framework to run maintenance tasks automatically against a host.

It does so in a way that may be a bit counterintuitive for someone used to Ansible:

• Almost everything is executed in check mode - The exceptions are tasks that won't break anything.
• Tasks that report ok can be considered completed - no human intervention is required.
• Tasks that report changed or failed require human intervention.

The tasks to run are grouped into "checklists". By convention, each checklist is implemented in a separate role, e.g.:

• The maintenance_10_linux role implements tasks common to most Linux systems
• The maintenance_11_debian role implements Debian-specific tasks

Checklists (i.e. roles) are assigned to hosts via playbooks. The example playbook in playbooks/playbook.yml applies each role to an eponymous host group. When using this example playbook, your inventory could look like this:

[maintenance_10_linux:children]
maintenance_11_debian
maintenance_15_rhel

[maintenance_11_debian]
debian01.example.org
debian02.example.org

[maintenance_15_rhel]
rhel01.example.org
centos01.example.org

Every checklist task (which may consist of more than one Ansible task) has a unique task ID in the form XX-YYY which XX being the checklist id and YYY being a consecutive number within the checklist. E.g. 10-042. These IDs can be used to exclude tasks from being applied to one or more hosts using the maintenance_exclude_tasks hostvar:

maintenance_exclude_tasks:
  - 10-042
  - 11-023

Some of the checklists have additional options which can be overwritten at the host or group level, e.g. to override the expected alias for root in /etc/aliases:

linux_serverlogs_root_alias: [email protected]

Check out roles/maintenance_*/defaults/main.yml to see which options can be overwritten.

Recommendations for ansible.cfg

[defaults]
display_skipped_hosts=no
display_ok_hosts=no
callbacks_whitelist=adfinis.maintenance.report
callbacks_enabled=adfinis.maintenance.report
duplicate_dict_key=ignore

License

GPL-3.0

Author Information

adfinis.maintenance was written by:

• Adfinis AG | Website | Twitter | GitHub