I had previously been removing some packages for security reasons,
then removing others because they were annoying, and yet *others*
because they were annoying on newer Ubuntus only. It is easier to
just unify these tasks and remove them all in one go.
On older Ubuntus where some packages don't exist the task will just
succeed because the package is absent anyways.
The default systemd journal configuration on CentOS 7 and Ubuntu
16.04 does not keep journal logs for multiple boots. This limits
the usefulness of the journal entirely (for example, try to see
sshd logs from even two or three months ago!).
Changing the storage to "persistent" makes systemd keep the logs
on disk in /var/log/journal for up to 2% of the partition size.
The default in later OpenSSH is 6, which seems too high. If you can't
get your password correct after 3 tries then I think you need help.
Eventually I'd like an easy way to enable blocking of repeated login
attempts at the firewall level. I think it's possible in firewalld.
After reörganizing for dynamic includes these tags will never be reached
because the children of dynamic includes do not inherit tags from their
parents as they did with static imports.
Use dynamic includes instead of static imports when you are running
tasks conditionally or using variable interpolation. The down side
is that you need to then tag the parent task as well as all child
tasks, as tags only apply to children of statically imported tasks.
Basically, when using conditionals or variables in your tasks you should
use include_tasks instead of import_tasks. The down side is that you now
need to tag all included tasks individually or with a block, unlike when
using static imports (tags are applied to all imported child tasks).
I would actually like to reduce this task to a single one that uses the
host's ansible_distribution variable, but Ansible 2.5.1 currently gives
the following error: ansible_distribution is undefined.
Vanilla Ubuntu (and Debian actually) defaults to using the official
mirror for security updates rather than country or regional mirrors.
Also, for what it's worth, Ubuntu mirrors didn't always sync these
security archives. I'd prefer to stay closer to vanilla Ubuntu but
also it kinda makes sense to get security updates from the official
source than a mirror (in case of delay or errors).
We stopped being able to do dynamic includes from the playbooks around
Ansible 2.4.0.0 if I recall correctly. Instead we can create a task to
include the variables and make it always run by using the special tag.
For now the Debian and Ubuntu vars files are the same, but I will keep
them separate so that it is more flexible in the future.
Ansible 2.4 and 2.5 are moving away from specialized loop functions
and the old syntax will eventually be deprecated and removed. I did
not change the with_fileglob loops because I'm not sure about their
syntax yet.
See: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/playbooks_loops.html
You should only use the "shell" module when you need shell functions
like flow control and redirects. Also, the "command" module is safer
because it is not affected by the user's environment.
Something seems to have happened as of Ansible 2.4.0.0 where this no
longer works. I suspect it is related to the major changes to static
and dynamic imports that landed around this same time.
In practice this achieves the same function, but without the "magic"
ability to use one task for different operating systems.
Something seems to have happened as of Ansible 2.4.0.0 where this no
longer works. I suspect it is related to the major changes to static
and dynamic imports that landed around this same time.
We make sure that this tasks always runs by using the special tag of
the same name.
Ansible 2.4 changes the way includes work. Now you have to use "import"
for playbooks and tasks that are static, and "include" for those that
are dynamic (ie, those that use variables, loops, etc).
See: http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/devel/playbooks_reuse_includes.html
I'm surprised this worked all these years actually. Since Ansible
version 1.6 it has been possible to use the version_compare filter
instead of doing math logic on strings.
See: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/playbooks_tests.html
This reverts commit 201165cff6.
Turns out this actually breaks initial deployments, because the
cache gets updated in the first task, then you add sources for
nginx and mariadb, but it doesn't update the indexes because the
cache is < 3600 seconds old, so you end up getting the distro's
versions of nginx and mariadb.
I have added cache_valid_time=3600 for the first task in each
tag that could be possibly running apt-related commands. For ex,
the "nginx" tag is also in the "packages" tag, but sometimes you
run the nginx tag by itself (perhaps repeatadely), so you'd want
to limit the update unless the cache was 1 hour old
I had removed them from Debian 8 and Ubuntu 14.04 configs last year
when the NSA's Suite B crypto guidelines dropped 128-bit algorithms
but those changes didn't make it to my new Ubuntu 16.04 config.
It is probably overkill and paranoid, but this server is mine, so I
can make those decisions (and I only connect from modern clients).
For idempotence we need to run all apt-related tasks, like editing
source files, adding keys, installing packages, etc, when running
the 'packages' tag.
Automatically uses the best mirror for your location, see:
http://httpredir.debian.org/demo.html
Should be much better than any hardcoded default for most hosts.
Signed-off-by: Alan Orth <alan.orth@gmail.com>
Note: I've only tested this on a Debian container, and you can't
set these sysctls on containers (the host controls them). To make
matters worse, there is no fact to make ansible skip this on hosts
that are running in containers. For now I will just skip it on
hosts that are "virtualization" servers... even though we actually
do have KVM running on Debian on real hardware. *sigh*
Signed-off-by: Alan Orth <alan.orth@gmail.com>
