Once upon a time I used to rely on nothing but a Secure Shell for access to my internal network, however this became more and more impractical the more things I stood up on the network and the more things I needed access to from my phone the less time I spent carrying a laptop with me. Given my long time favouritism for OpenVPN and how much the platform had . . .
My personal infrastructure has gone through a number of iterations. Starting as a 450mhz Pentium 3 Ubuntu 7.04 server running SMB on a single 5400 RPM IDE disk cobbled together through a BT home hub and some cheap megabit switches, it later became an Ubuntu 14.06 host on a laptop with a broken screen and gigabit switches, then a Pentium 4 desktop and then a lightweight Gigabyte Brix mini-PC before . . .
Netbox is an incredible tool and I’ll happily say I don’t know how I worked before I was introduced to it, scrabbling around in leviathan (non version controlled) spreadsheets and SharePoint pages that try to perform IP address management, or even worse the notes on a scrap of paper or book on someone’s desk. There are other tools on the market, but they cost an arm and a leg for . . .
One of Ansible’s most brilliant features is Privilege Escalation, the ability to enter the context of a more privileged user following an initial connection to either your local or remote node, however a bizarre little caveat in Tower I haven’t been able find documented anywhere and it refers to the use of a system account (by default named awx) on the localhost. What Is AWX Anyway? Floating around all over . . .