In the previous post on testing Ansible roles with Travis-CI, I introduced a method to run playbooks on CentOS using Docker. In this post, we take this one step further and show how you can run multi-platform tests of Ansible roles.
In this first post on testing Ansible roles with Travis-CI, we’ll discuss how you can apply a test playbook on CentOS. Out-of-the-box, Travis-CI doesn’t support CentOS, as its test environment is Ubuntu-based. However, Travis-CI allows you to set up a Docker container and this opens up all kinds of possibilities.
Many HOWTO’s and blog posts about installing MySQL/MariaDB, a LAMP stack, etc. suggest to run the script mysql_secure_installation to tighten the security holes in the default installation of the database engine. This includes setting a root password (empty by default), removing anonymous users, and deleting a test database. For a database server that you’re going to run in production, it is really important to do this. However, I have a problem with the fact that mysql_secure_installation is interactive, i.e. it asks for user input. This makes it very hard to include it in an automated setup. In this post, we’ll discuss how the script works and how we can automate what it does.
When you execute the command ls -l in UNIX, you get detailed information about files: permissions, file size, date of last modification, etc. A while ago, I got a question from one of my students who wondered what the second column meant. According to the documentation, it’s the “number of hard links,” but what does that actually mean? Let’s get to the bottom of this.
Hyper-V and VirtualBox are two virtualization platforms that we both use in our system administration courses. Unfortunately, once Hyper-V is active, it won’t coexist with other virtualization platforms. In this post, I discuss a method to work around this problem by setting up a custom boot entry for each platform.
