Anisble Playbooks for Vital

These playbooks are used to automate the configuration of VM's for Network Security and Computer Networks Lab on Vital at NYU. All the VM's are configured using Ubuntu 16.04.03 LTS Server as base image.

Modules Used

We have used several modules in ansible for the creation of these playbooks.

Pkg Module

It is used for the installation of the packages in all the VM's.

name: Install Packaged
apt:
   name: apache-httpd:
   state: present

Copy Module

It is used for copying the exiting configuration files to the configured VM.

name: Copy Files
copy:
    src: /path/to/files/on/local/machine
    dest: /path/to/copy/files/on destionation

Shell Module

Some packages comes with TUI (Textbase User Interface) and we need to provide some information to them manually. apt modules can't handle the installation of these modules. In order to use the default options and skip the TUI we need to used an Environment Variable called DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive to proceed. The Shell modules gives us the accessiblity to use the Shell to run any shell command.

name: Run some shell commands
shell: DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -y <pkg>

How to run the playbooks

There are 8 playbooks in total, 4 for Net-Sec and 4 for Computer-Networks.

├── Computer-Networks                               
│   ├── CN_R1                                       
│   │   ├── ansible.cfg                             
│   │   ├── configuration-files                     
│   │   ├── hosts                                   
│   │   ├── lightdm                                 
│   │   │   └── lightdm.conf                        
│   │   └── playbook.yml                            
│   ├── CN_R2                                       
│   │   ├── ansible.cfg                             
│   │   ├── configuration-files                     
│   │   ├── hosts                                   
│   │   ├── lightdm                                 
│   │   │   └── lightdm.conf                        
│   │   └── playbook.yml                            
│   ├── CN_R3                                       
│   │   ├── ansible.cfg                             
│   │   ├── configuration-files                     
│   │   ├── hosts                                   
│   │   ├── lightdm                                 
│   │   │   └── lightdm.conf                        
│   │   └── playbook.yml                            
│   └── CN_R4                                       
│       ├── ansible.cfg                             
│       ├── configuration-files                     
│       ├── hosts                                   
│       ├── lightdm                                 
│       │   └── lightdm.conf                        
│       └── playbook.yml                            
└── Network-Security                                
    ├── Ext-router                                  
    │   ├── ansible.cfg                             
    │   ├── configuration-files                     
    │   ├── ext-router.yml                          
    │   ├── hosts                                   
    │   └── lightdm                                 
    │       └── lightdm.conf                        
    ├── Int-linux                                   
    │   ├── ansible.cfg                             
    │   ├── configuration-files                     
    │   ├── int-linux.yml                          
    │   ├── hosts                                   
    │   └── lightdm                                 
    │       └── lightdm.conf                        
    ├── Int-router                                  
    │   ├── ansible.cfg                             
    │   ├── configuration-files                     
    │   ├── int-router.yml                          
    │   ├── hosts                                   
    │   └── lightdm                                 
    │       └── lightdm.conf                        
    └── Ubuntu                                      
        ├── ansible.cfg                             
        ├── configuration-files                     
        ├── Ubuntu.yml                          
        ├── hosts                                   
        └── lightdm                                 
            └── lightdm.conf

Each playbook contains a host file, which contains the IP address of the VM to the plybook against.

[Computer-Networks]
root@192.168.1.14

Replace the IP address with the IP address your VM.

Place the Playbooks in /home/ as the location of the files are configured in that way.

name: Copy Configuration files
  copy:
    src: ~/ansible/ComputerNetworks/CN_R1/configuration-files/
    dest: /etc/

Running the Playbook

Remember Ansible use SSH to login into the VM, I have used SSH-Keys to login without password as this is the recommended method. Copy the SSH-Keys from local machine to the remote host, so that we can login without a password.

$ ssh-copy-id <user>@<ip>

Now check if you are able to ping the remote host.

$ ansible all -m ping

output

Computer-Networks | SUCCESS => {
    "changed": false,
    "ping": "pong"
}

all ping all the hosts for that playbook. -m ping use ping module

Run the playbook.

$ ansible-playbook playbook.yml

If everything works fine the remote VM will be configured.