Securing Tower Installer Passwords

One of the crucial pieces of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is Ansible Tower. Ansible Tower helps scaling IT automation, managing complex deployments and speeding up productivity. A strength of Ansible Tower is its simplicity that also extends to the installation routine: when installed as a non-container version, a simple script is used to read in variables from an initial configuration to deploy Ansible Tower. The same script and initial configuration can even be re-used to extend the setup and add, for example, more cluster nodes.

However, part of this initial configuration are passwords for the database, Ansible Tower itself and so on. In many online examples, these passwords are often stored in plain text. One question I frequently get as a Red Hat Consultant is how to protect this information. A common solution is to simply remove the file after you complete the installation of Ansible Tower. But, there are reasons you may want to keep the file around. In this article, I will present another way to protect the passwords in your installation files.

Ansible Tower’s setup.sh

For some quick background, setup.sh is the script used to install Ansible Tower and is provided in Continue reading

Tolerable Ansible

Ansible Playbooks are very easy to read and their linear execution makes it simple to understand what will happen while a playbook is executing. Unfortunately, in some circumstances, the things you need to automate may not function in a linear fashion. For example, I was once asked to perform the following tasks with Ansible:

• Notify an external patching system to patch a Windows target
• Wait until the patching process was completed before moving on with the remaining playbooks tasks

While the request sounded simple, upon further investigation it would prove more challenging for the following reasons:

• The system patched the server asynchronously from the call. i.e. the call into the patching system would simply put the target node into a queue to be patched 
• The patching process itself could last for several hours
• As part of the patching process the system would reboot no fewer than two times but with an unspecified maximum depending on the patches which need to be applied
• Due to the specific implementation of the patching system the only reliable way to tell if patching was completed was by interrogating a registry entry on the client
• If the patching took too long to complete additional Continue reading

Connect Ansible Tower and Jenkins in under 5 minutes

We often hear from customers that they are using Jenkins in some capacity or another. And since I'm a consultant, I'm lucky to hear first hand what our customers are using and how they need to integrate Ansible Tower. There has always been a way to integrate the Ansible Tower and Jenkins using tower-cli, but I thought there could be a neater, closer to native, way of doing it.

So here we go. I've recorded this short screencast to show you just how easy it is:

Below you will find a few links from the video and a link to how to try Ansible Tower.

plugins.jenkins.io/ansible-tower

wiki.jenkins.io/display/JENKINS/Ansible+Tower+Plugin

Try Ansible Tower