How To Software

Armughan AkbarMay 2, 2026

0 46

Configuring Persistent System Logging and Log Rotation via Ansible Playbooks

About a month ago, I woke up to a freezing cold Monday morning, as I experienced a tenfold production crash when our app went offline and our monitoring dashboards were not providing any relevant info on the outage. I took too long to find out what caused the outage; /var/log/MYSERVER had completely filled up all disk space because log rotation had failed after a recent package upgrade. No alerts were sent out, nor was there…

Armughan AkbarMay 2, 2026

0 37

Designing Secure Credential Storage with Ansible Vault for Production Environments

I mistakenly shared an unencrypted production database password on a shared git repository while deploying at 2 am several years ago. This caused panic to ensue as I frantically tried to replace passwords, look through logs, and consume copious amounts of caffeine! Following this experience, I started to use ansible vault appropriately. Once you start to grow your use of ansible vault beyond a single file for one password, issues start popping up in the…

Armughan AkbarMay 2, 2026

0 39

Standardizing Package Management Across Hybrid Linux Environments Using Ansible Modules

Two years ago I inherited a fleet that consisted of a mix of Ubuntu 18.04, CentOS 7, and several Amazon Linux 2 boxes. Prior to our standards approach, each of these platforms had their own custom way of patching (so called “bug fixing”). This was typically done through multiple shell scripts that included an if [ -f /etc/debian_version ] conditional and nobody wanted to touch. Each time a new application was added to the mix, someone would…

ZainMay 1, 2026

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Implementing SSH Key-Based Authentication for Secure Ansible Managed Node Connectivity

The initial time I experienced an Ansible playbook freeze up, I was aghast when I finally tracked down the root cause as being the prompt for a password and could not use an automation tool that did not require me giving out passwords, and it was late and I was getting “Host key verification failed” due to a result of an elaborate chain of unfortunate events. At this moment I decided to put together a…

ZainMay 1, 2026

0 44

Automating Multi-Node Web Server Provisioning with Ansible Roles and Handlers

I still remember the first time I had to roll out a basic Nginx config to a handful of VPS instances. I SSH’d into each node, ran the same apt install, copied over a vhost file with scp, and reloaded the service. It worked. The next month, when the devs asked for a new vhost on all six nodes, I did it again. And the month after that, I added a third vhost. That’s when I…