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.