Tutorial-Series

Series: Ansible Like a Pro Part 1: Why Ansible Won Config Management — Config management landscape, why Ansible won, the architecture of ansible-navigator and execution environments Part 2: Building a Real Execution Environment — Pinned and private collections, Python dependency conflicts, the additional_build_steps escape hatch, a local registry for sharing Part 3 ← You are here — Inventories, your first real playbook, the navigator TUI versus stdout, artifacts and replay, and the first-week mistakes Part 4: Roles, Reuse, and Keeping It Honest — Planned Two parts of plumbing. That’s what you’ve sat through so far. Part 1 was the why, Part 2 was the container the why runs in. Neither of them configured a single server. ...

Series: Ansible Like a Pro Part 1: Why Ansible Won Config Management — Config management landscape, why Ansible won, the architecture of ansible-navigator and execution environments Part 2 ← You are here — Building a real execution environment: pinned and private collections, Python dependency conflicts, the additional_build_steps escape hatch, and a local registry for sharing Part 3: Writing Your First Playbook with Navigator — Inventories, your first real playbook, the navigator TUI versus stdout, artifacts and replay, and the first-week mistakes In Part 1 we built an execution environment. Twenty lines of YAML, one ansible-builder build, and we were running playbooks inside a container. That was the toy. ...

Series: Ansible Like a Pro Part 1 ← You are here — Config management landscape, why Ansible won, architecture of ansible-navigator and execution environments Part 2: Building a Real Execution Environment — Pinned and private collections, Python dependency conflicts, the additional_build_steps escape hatch, a local registry for sharing Part 3: Writing Your First Playbook with Navigator — Inventories, your first real playbook, the navigator TUI versus stdout, artifacts and replay, and the first-week mistakes I’ve been doing config management for over a decade now. Puppet in 2012. Chef in 2014. Salt around 2016. Ansible since 2017. I’ve got the scars. ...

Series: Learn Datacenter Networking on Your Laptop Part 1: GNS3 Foundation & Linux Networking Primer — Bridges, taps, host networking setup, your first lab Part 2: VLANs, Bonding, and Network Segregation — VLANs, NIC bonding, LACP, bridge isolation Part 3 ← You are here — iPerf3, fiber troubleshooting, Juniper switch diagnostics, throughput testing I spent last weekend debugging a link between two Juniper switches that was running at 2Gbps on a 10G interface. The fiber was plugged in, the lights were blinking, and both switches happily reported “Link is up.” Everything looked fine. Except it wasn’t. ...

Series: Learn Datacenter Networking on Your Laptop Part 1: GNS3 Foundation & Linux Networking Primer — Bridges, taps, host networking setup, your first lab Part 2 ← You are here — VLANs, NIC bonding, network segregation Part 3: iPerf3, Fiber, and Juniper — Testing Like a Pro — Throughput testing, fiber diagnostics, Juniper config Here’s a thing about real datacenter networks nobody warns you about: you’ll spend more time debugging VLANs and bonding than you will configuring routing. ...

Series: Learn Datacenter Networking on Your Laptop Part 1 ← You are here — GNS3 foundation, virtual networking mental model, bridges, taps, Linux networking across distros Part 2: VLANs, Bonding, and Network Segregation — VLANs, NIC bonding modes, LACP, bridge isolation Part 3: iPerf3, Fiber, and Juniper — Testing Your Datacenter Network Like a Pro I’ve been managing datacenter networks for a few years now. Not hyperscaler stuff — the kind where you have real switching infrastructure, multiple VLANs screaming across bonded NICs, and the constant background anxiety of wondering which unlabeled cable goes to production storage. ...