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2020-03-02

Sounds like OSQuery and Ansible?

Ansible is a configuration management tool that can affect multiple boxes at once. It’s great for deploying things and setting things up.

If you’ve got a box with SSH, ansible can manage it. No agent required.

Inventories

Ansible needs targets to work with. An Inventory is just a list of targets.

“Idempotable” - the concept of idempotence - ansible will not attempt changes that are already made

A simple inventory is just a list of IPs.

Or, things can be in groups.

[web]
hostname1
hostname2

[db]
hostname3

Looks like INI format.

Patterns:

• Single
  • just X
• Inclusive
  • X and Y
• Exclusive
  • All of X except Y
• Unions
  • X and Y again I guess

Specify things from most to least specific.

All actions describe tasks, which describe a state. Expressed in YAML.

In other words, define a state in YAML. Ansible then performs the task of getting a machine to that state.

Task control:

• Looping
• privesc
• conditionals

Idempotence - Ansible has it, scripts do not.

Tasks return data, like what they did.

Modules? Oh boy. “bits of code”. hmmmmm.