On Fri, Dec 26, 2025 at 06:24:37AM -0600, Richard Owlett wrote: > On 12/26/25 5:57 AM, Roger Price wrote: > > On Fri, 26 Dec 2025, Richard Owlett wrote: > > > > > Though a computer USER since the days of vacuum tube CPUs, I've never > > > heard of > > > "Ansible roles and playbooks".\ > > > > It's used in BIG Red Hat installations. > > > > > From the Ansible site: "Ansible is an agentless automation tool that > > > you install > > on a single host (referred to as the control node)." > > > > "From the control node, Ansible can manage an entire fleet of machines and > > other > > devices (referred to as managed nodes) remotely with SSH, Powershell > > remoting, > > and numerous other transports, all from a simple command-line interface > > with no > > databases or daemons required." > > > > Roger > > > > > > *CHUCKLE* > Having never heard of "Ansible roles and playbooks", the *FIRST* thing I did > was a web search. Browsing a couple of hits and a Wikipedia article prompted > me to ask if OP was properly parsing his problem.
Ansible belongs to the class of "configuration management" tools, of which the oldest specimen is, IIRC, GNU cfengine. There's also Puppet, Chef, and so on. Ansible is what the cool kids use these days -- and has thus the biggest library of recipes (Ansible calls it playbooks), and the broadest mindshare currently, which makes life easier to those who don't want to come up with own ones (thinking is hard, especially if it's oneself who has to do it). Large installations are by far not the only use case. Whenever you want to have repeatable installation processes (possibly parameterized by some tidbits, like host name, IP address, this or that snippet of software, you name it) they are a very useful pattern/tool. A configuration management recipe *plus* a good backup of user data makes for a very good "bare metal" recovery strategy, for example. But you have to invest some effort to actually test and debug your recipe. Cheers -- t
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