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rho - Tool for discovering RHEL, Linux, and Unix Servers

rho is a tool for scanning a network, logging into systems using SSH, and retrieving information about available Unix and Linux servers.

This README contains information about installing rho, basic usage, known issues, and best practices. For more details information about the available command and command options with rho, see the manpage.

Intro to rho

rho is an Ansible-based network inventory tool. rho scans a user-defined range of machines and then reports basic information about the operating system and hardware for each server. rho simplifies some basic sysadmin tasks, like managing licensing renewals and new deployments.

rho only has to be installed on a single central server to scan all of the servers on a network or subnet. rho is an agent-less discovery tool built on Ansible, so there is no need to install anything on any server but the one which will run the scans. Ansible uses SSH, which is commonly available for server, on both the scanning server and the target machines.

The rho tool itself is set up through two configuration items:
  • auth entries, which contain the username and password or SSH key to access each server
  • profile entries, which contain IP address ranges, and the auth credentials to use.

There can be multiple auth entries in each profile. A profile contains all the hosts and ranges that are to be tested against the auths.

The rho tool configuration is created using rho itself. There are subcommands to create and edit auth and profile items in the configuration. For example:

rho auth add --name server1auth --username rho-user --sshkeyfile /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key --password

This creates a new auth item named server1auth, which uses the SSH user rho-user with a key stored in the key file. The password is input as a CLI prompt.

(The different rho commands are covered more in the Command Syntax & Usage section.)

All the information that rho needs is stored in the $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/rho and $XDG_DATA_HOME/rho folders in the installed directory. All the auths are stored in the credentials file. All the profiles are stored in the profiles file. The Ansible playbook is called rho_playbook.yml stored in the installed directory.The roles created during the scan are stored in the roles folder. These roles are used by rho_playbook.yml to perform the fact collection.

Running the scan is simple. Just point the rho tool to the profile to use, the facts to collect and print the results to a CSV output file. Optional parameters are the number of processes Ansible should use and whether or not to process the profile using --cache. A newly created or freshly edited profile cannot be processed using cache as the program must create an Ansible inventory called <profile name>_hosts.yml that includes the working hosts matched with an auth each (the auths are chosen in the order passed in to the profile add or edit command as will be explained later).

rho scan --profile big_test --facts facts_file --ansible-forks 100 --reportfile rep.csv

The output is simple CSV format. If 'default' is the argument for --facts, the csv output contains the following information:

OS,kernel,processor,platform,release name,release version,release number,system ID,username,instnum,release,CPU count,CPU vendor,CPU model,BIOS vendor,virtual guest/host,virtual type

For example:

Linux,i686,i386,redhat-release,5Client,5.3.0.3,ID-1000015943, jsmith,da3122afdb7edd23,Red Hat Enterprise Linux Client release 5.3 (Tikanga),2,GenuineIntel,Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU,Award Software, Inc.,host, xen

As implied by the report output, rho differentiates between baremetal machines, virtual hosts, and virtual guests, and identifies several major virtual types (Xen, Qemu, KVM, and VMWare). It can be very important for inventorying machines and maintaining software licenses to separate virtual hosts from guests; rho returns that information with every scan, by default.

More information can be found in rho's documentation.

Requirements & Assumptions

Before installing rho, there are some guidelines about which machine it should be installed on:
  • rho is written to run on RHEL or Fedora servers.
  • The machine that rho is installed on must be able to access the machines to be scanned, so it must be on the network and the machines must be running.
  • The target machines must be running SSH.
  • The user account that rho uses to SSH into the machine must have adequate permissions to run commands and read certain files.
  • The user account rho uses for a machine should have a sh like shell. For example, it cannot be a /sbin/nologin or /bin/false shell.
These python packages are required for the rho install machine to run rho:
  • python
  • gettext
  • json
  • subprocess
  • xmlrpclib
  • ansible
  • pexpect
  • future
  • sh
  • pyxdg
The following python packages are required to build & test rho from source:
  • python-devel
  • python-setuptools
  • pytest
  • pytest-cov
  • Mock
  • flake8
  • pylint
  • Coverage
  • enum34
  • configparser
  • six
  • docutils

Building the man page from source requires pandoc to be installed.

Installation

rho is available for download from fedora COPR.

1. First, make sure that the EPEL repo is enabled for the server. You can find the appropriate architecture and version on the EPEL wiki:

rpm -Uvh http://fedora-epel.mirrors.tds.net/fedora-epel/7/x86_64/e/epel-release-7-10.noarch.rpm

2. Next, add the COPR repo to your server. You can find the appropriate architecture and version on the COPR rho page:

wget -O /etc/yum.repos.d/chambridge-rho-epel-7.repo https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/chambridge/rho/repo/epel-7/chambridge-rho-epel-7.repo
  1. Then, install the rho package:

yum install rho

Command Syntax & Usage

The basic syntax is:

rho command subcommand [options]

There are four rho commands:
  • auth - for managing auth entries
  • profile - for managing profile entries
  • scan - for running scans
  • fact - to show information about the facts rho can collect
auth and profile both have five subcommands:
  • add - to create a new entry
  • edit - to modify an existing entry
  • clear - to remove any or all entries
  • show - to display a specific entry
  • list - to display one or more entries
fact has two subcommands:
  • list - to display the list of facts that can be scanned
  • hash - to hash sensitive facts within report

The complete list of options for each command and subcommand are listed in the rho manpage with other usage examples. The common options are listed with the examples in this document.

For expanded information on auth entries, profiles, scanning, and output read the syntax and usage document.

Development

Begin by cloning the repository:

git clone [email protected]:quipucords/rho.git

rho currently supports Python 2.7, 3.5, 3.6. If you don't have Python on your system follow these instructions. Based on your system you may be using either pip or pip3 to install modules, for simplicity the instructions below will specify pip.

Installing Dependencies

From within the local clone root directory run the following command to install dependencies needed for development and testing purposes:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Build

In order to build rho run the following command:

make build

Linting

In order to lint changes made to the source code execute the following command:

make lint

Testing

Unit Testing

To run the unit tests with the interpreter available as python, use:

make tests

Continuous testing runs on travis: https://travis-ci.org/quipucords/rho

Functional Testing

To run end-to-end functional tests against local virtual machines follow the information in functional test document.

Frequently Asked Questions

For expanded troubleshooting information read the FAQ document.

Issues

To report bugs for rho open issues against this repository in Github. Please complete the issue template when opening a new bug to improve investigation and resolution time.

Changes

Track & find changes to the tool in CHANGES.

Authors

Authorship and current maintainer information can be found in AUTHORS.

Contributing

Reference the CONTRIBUTING guide for information to the project.

Copyright & License

Copyright 2009-2017, Red Hat, Inc.

rho is released under the GNU Public License version 2.