10–14 Jun 2025
University of Ottawa
EST timezone

Using Ansible and SSH to manage FreeBSD systems at scale and reproducible

Not scheduled
50m
Desmarais Building (DMS) (University of Ottawa)

Desmarais Building (DMS)

University of Ottawa

55 Laurier Ave E. Ottawa, ON, K1N 6N5
Tutorial half-day SysAdmin

Description

Configuration management and automation tools, like ansible, can make the life of a system administrator easier both by being able to scale operations as well as help in reproducible create new deployments.
An additional advantage is that the automation will, if done consistently will also document all steps done to create the systems.

In this tutorial attendees will learn how to use ansible to administrate FreeBSD machines and be able to go through a practical example in a virtual lab to gain confidence and evaluate what techniques they would want to use in practice:

  • basics
  • installing freebsd-updates
  • installing and updating packages
  • configuring rc.conf
  • copying files
  • modifying config files
  • using the included templating engine to generate (even complex) files.
  • using dynamic inventory to get the information for the new system out of existing systems already describing the desired state of your systems, for which we will use netbox as an example in the lab enviroment.
  • being aware of things that can still lead to differences in the created systems on how to deal with these influences

Attendees will need a laptop with a Web browser to access the virtual lab environment.

One-line summary How to use ansible and SSH to reproducably create and manage FreeBSD systems

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