About

Ansible roles for deploying my home computers and servers.

Initial State

Generally these playbooks require that the target physical or virtual machine has:

1. Fedora or Fedora Server installed
2. Has a user for ansible to use
3. The user is in the wheel group
4. IP address has been set up
5. openssh has been enabled and allowed through the firewall
6. SSH keys have been set up for the ansible controller to SSH to the host

Setup for Git Developer Roles

1. Set your git email and user name in inventories/group_vars/developer.yml

---
git_config_email: <your git email here>
git_config_user_name: "<your name here>"

2. Create or edit a vault for each host which needs the git certificate and key

ansible-vault create host_vars/myhost/vault.yml

OR

ansible-vault edit host_vars/myhost/vault.yml

3. Add the certificate and private keys as variables:

---
git_certificate: |
  -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
  ...
  -----END CERTIFICATE-----

git_private_key: |
  -----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----
  ...
  -----END PRIVATE KEY-----

Usage Examples

ansible-playbook -i inventories/network_home.ini -l chris_linux_computer -K playbooks/setup-desktop.yml

ansible-playbook -i inventories/network_home.ini -l fileserver.network.home -K playbooks/setup-server.yml
ansible-playbook -i inventories/network_home.ini -l homeassistant.network.home -K playbooks/setup-server.yml

ansible-playbook -i inventories/network_home.ini -l homeassistant.network.home -K playbooks/setup-podman-and-services.yml
ansible-playbook -i inventories/network_home.ini -l chris_linux_computer -K playbooks/setup-podman-and-services.yml

Debugging Podman Containers

Check the service file that was generated and check that podman is being called correctly:

cat .config/systemd/user/homeassistant-container.service

Show the output of a user container:

journalctl -f

OR

podman logs -f gitlab

Start, stop, or check the status a user container:

systemctl --user start/stop/status homeassistant-container

Check the groups that a user is in (Note: dialout for access to /dev/ttyUSB0 or /dev/ttyACM0):

$ groups
homeassistant wheel dialout

Show the output of a user service:

journalctl --user -f -u homeassistant-container

Debugging Home Assistant configuration changes:

systemctl --user restart homeassistant-container
tail -F srv/homeassistant/config/home-assistant.log

General Podman Container Administration

When upgrading the version or changing the settings of a container you can just run the playbooks/setup-podman-and-services.yml playbook, but I prefer to stop the container manually and perform a backup before redeploying it, for example:

ssh vaultwarden@<ip>
$ systemctl --user stop vaultwarden-container
$ (cd srv && zip -r vaultwarden20231104.zip ./vaultwarden)

Now you can run the playbooks/setup-podman-and-services.yml playbook to upgrade the version or update the settings.

Vaultwarden Administration

When the admin page is enabled you can log in here to change the configuration:

https://vaultwarden.network.home:4443/admin

Gitlab Administration

Get the initial root (Administrator) user password for the gitlab web interface (As the gitlab container user):

$ podman exec -it gitlab grep 'Password:' /etc/gitlab/initial_root_password
Password: e3bvA0wciJup5epRQKX31pDE+H6hp3dZBY8llbpF3bY=

NOTE: When updating the gitlab version remember to upgrade between the official upgrade paths as documented in roles/podman_gitlab/defaults/main.yml

Home Assistant Administration

Reset Home Assistant user password by execing into the container, changing the password, exiting and restarting the container:

podman exec -ti homeassistant /bin/bash
$ hass --script auth --config /config change_password chris mytemporarypassword
$ exit
systemctl --user restart homeassistant-container

Then log in via the web interface and change it to a real password (This ensures that the real password is not added to the bash history, even temporarily).