[Short Tip] Retrieve your public IP with Ansible

There are multiple situations where you need to know your public IP: be it that you set up your home IT server behind a NAT, be it that your legacy enterprise business solution does not work properly without this information because the original developers 20 years ago never expected to be behind a NAT.

Of course, Ansible can help here as well: there is a tiny, neat module called ipify_facts which does nothing else but retrieving your public IP:

$ ansible localhost -m ipify_facts
localhost | SUCCESS => {
    "ansible_facts": {
        "ipify_public_ip": "23.161.144.221"
    }, 
    "changed": false
}

The return value can be registered as a variable and reused in other tasks:

---
- name: get public IP
  hosts: all 

  tasks:
    - name: get public IP
      ipify_facts:
      register: public_ip
    - name: output
      debug: msg="{{ public_ip }}"

The module by default accesses https://api.ipify.org to get the IP address, but the api URL can be changed via parameter.

[Short Tip] Show all variables of a host

There are multiple sources where variables for Ansible can be defined. Most of them can be shown via the setup module, but there are more.

For example, if you use a dynamic inventory script to access a Satellite server many variables like the organization are provided via the inventory script – and these are not shown in setup usually.

To get all variables of a host use the following notation:

---
- name: dump all
  hosts: all

  tasks:
  - name: get variables
    debug: var=hostvars[inventory_hostname]

Use this during debug to find out if the variables you’ve set somewhere are actually accessible in your playbooks.

If even created a small github repository for this to easily integrate it with Tower.

[Short Tip] Query all registered repositories in Red Hat Satellite

The idea of RESTful APIs is pretty appealing: using the basic components of the WWW as APIs to bring together services. Operations like HTTP GET and POST, base URIs and media types like JSON are supported almost everywhere simply because the web is supported almost everywhere, it is pretty easy to provide REST enabled servers, services and clients with a few clicks and calls. For this reason the API of Red Hat Satellite – and most of the other Red Hat products – is built as REST API.

I’ve already written an article about how to access the Satellite REST API via Ansible. Today I came across a rather handy example: sometimes you need to know the URLs of the Satellite provided repos. This can of course be queried via the API. But in contrast to my old article, we do not query the Foreman part of the api ($SATELLITE_URL/api/) but the Katello part: /katello/api/.

All repositories can be shown via the URL /katello/api/repositories?organization_id=1. To query URLs on the command line I recommend Ansible:

$ ansible localhost -m uri -a "method=GET user=admin password=$PASSWORD force_basic_auth=yes validate_certs=no url=https://satellite-server.example.com/katello/api/repositories?organization_id=1&full_results=true"
localhost | SUCCESS => {
    "apipie_checksum": "7cd3aad709af2f1ae18a3daa0915d712", 
    "cache_control": "must-revalidate, private, max-age=0", 
    "changed": false,
...
    "id": 45, 
    "label": "EPEL_7_-_x86_64", 
...
    "product": {
      "cp_id": "1452001252604", 
      "id": 127, 
      "name": "EPEL", 
      "sync_plan": [
        "name", 
        "description", 
        "sync_date", 
        "interval", 
        "next_sync"
      ]
    }, 
    "relative_path": "Platin/Library/custom/EPEL/EPEL_7_-_x86_64", 
    "url": "http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/"
...

The option full_results just ensures that the entire result is shown even if it is pretty long. Note that the product I can be used to query the entire product information:

$ ansible localhost -m uri -a "method=GET user=admin password=$PASSWORD force_basic_auth=yes validate_certs=no url=https://satellite-server.example.com/katello/api/products/127"
localhost | SUCCESS => {
...
  "id": 127, 
  "label": "EPEL", 
  "last_sync": "2016-01-05 13:43:38 UTC", 
  "last_sync_words": "about 1 month", 
  "name": "EPEL", 
  "organization": {
...

The id of the repository can be used to query the full repository information, including a full repo path:

$ ansible localhost -m uri -a "method=GET user=admin password=$PASSWORD force_basic_auth=yes validate_certs=no url=https://satellite-server.example.com/katello/api/repositories/45"      
localhost | SUCCESS => {
...
  "content_type": "yum", 
  "full_path": "http://satellite-server.example.com/pulp/repos/Platin/Library/custom/EPEL/EPEL_7_-_x86_64",
...

If you want to skip the part figuring out the IDs manually but have a name you could search for, it is possible to filter the results. The search URL for this case would be: /katello/api/repositories?organization_id=1&full_results=true&search=*EPEL*" as shown in the following example:

$ ansible localhost -m uri -a "method=GET user=admin password=$PASSWORD force_basic_auth=yes validate_certs=no url=https://satellite-server.example.com/katello/api/repositories?organization_id=1&full_results=true&search=*EPEL*"
localhost | SUCCESS => {
...
  "relative_path": "Platin/Library/custom/EPEL/EPEL_7_-_x86_64", 
...

[Short Tip] Use Red Hat Satellite 6 as an inventory resource in Ansible

Besides static file inventories, Ansible can use custom scripts to dynamically generate inventories or access other sources, for example a CMDB or a system management server – like Red Hat Satellite.
Luckily, Nick Strugnell has already written a custom script to use Satellite as an inventory source in Ansible.

After checking out the git, the hammer.ini needs to be adjusted: at least host, username, password and organization must be adjusted.

Afterwards, the script can be invoked directly to show the available hosts:

$ ansible -i ~/Github/ansible-satellite6/satellite-inventory.py all --list-hosts
    argon.example.com
    satellite-server.example.com
    helium.example.com
...

This works with ansible CLI and playbook calls:

$ ansible-playbook -i ~/Github/ansible-satellite6/satellite-inventory.py apache-setup.yml
PLAY [apache setup] *********************************************************** 

GATHERING FACTS *************************************************************** 
...

The script works quite well – as long as the certificate you use on the Satellite server is trusted. Otherwise the value for self.ssl_verify must be set to False. Besides, it is a nice and simple way to access already existing inventory stores. This is important because Ansible is all about integration, and not about “throwing away and making new”.