Tips & tricks for Ansible

Ansible is a very powerful configuration management tool. It can be used to deploy settings and software to one or more (virtual) machines. Using a CM-tool ensures that every deployment is done in exactly the same way. This doesn’t only make your job as a system engineer a whole lot easier, it also results in a more stable environment since every machine is consistent and more predictable. I’m using Ansible intensively for quite some time now and found that it was time to write a post about some small, but usually hard to find or annoying to solve, problems or challenges.

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Create a PXE bootserver to install multiple Linux distributions

When regularly installing Linux hosts or VM’s, it easily becomes annoying to constantly burn CD’s/DVD’s or mount ISO’s for all the Linux distributions that you want to deploy. Especially if you want to keep them current or customize them you’ll end up with a whole lot of discs. Booting your installations from the network, using a PXE boot server, makes life a lot easier and isn’t very hard to setup. In this post I’ll explain how to setup such a PXE boot server that is able to provide multiple Linux distribution installations for deployment over the network.

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