Over the Xmas break I did a fair bit of beavering away, getting the beginnings of an SOE up and running using Ansible for the initial setup.

The plan is probably to switch to Puppet for most of the subsequent setup, but Ansible is a good tool especially for the early stages.

Currently targeting Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)/CentOS/Fedora & Ubuntu.

So far, the SOE does the following:

– installs ssh keys for management with Ansible
– sets up yum/dnf repositories, including local repositories for faster installation & updates
– sets up & starts Nagios nrpe & Collectd monitoring
– sets up & starts CockPit management interface
– sets up Puppet for further automation
– ensures Xfce desktop environment is installed & set to start on boot.
– ensures several other important apps are installed, and this list is easy to add to.

Project is here, on GitHub.

Here’s a shot of the CockPit management interface, up & running. It’s a nice tool: