Posted on

Map Network drive location on Windows Server

The easiest way to perform massive identical installations on web servers that are located on the same network (VLAN) is through a network map of the remote location. With only two steps you can perform remote installations.

Firstly select map a network drive and assign a drive letter to the remote location.

Select map network drive

Select your preferred drive letter.

Map your network location server to a Drive letter
Open a terminal and just go to the specified location. In my case it was Z:

change directory to your remote location through a cmd or GUI and perform your installations.

Posted on

Ansible playbook – variable files must contain either a dictionary or a list

Recently I faced the below error when I tried to use some variables which I initialized on a ansible vault file.

My code is shown below. It just prints some values retrieved from a vault.

playbook code. using debug module values are printed.

While deploying the playbook the below error appears:

ERROR! variable files must contain either a dictionary of variables, or a list of dictionaries. Got: user_password:password database_password:password ( <class ‘ansible.parsing.yaml.objects.AnsibleUnicode’>)

Dictionary file

ansible vault variables

In order to resolve issue, you should just leave a blank between dictionary key and value.

Deploy again your playbook and the result will be successful.

Posted on

Set up yum repository for locally-mounted DVD on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8

RedHat Enterprise Linux 8 changes the way packages are delivered by splitting the main repository that was available on RedHat 7 systems to the below two (link with more information is attached at the bottom of the article)

  • BaseOS
  • AppStream

As a result when you locally mount a DVD to be used as a repository for packages one should create now two repositories instead of one.

Attach dvd to virtual server, mount directory and create repositories on /etc/yum.repos.d

Create repository files

Change permissions to repository files to 0644

AppStream

BaseOS

Validate that both repos are enabled

repositories enabled

Find below the procedure documented from RedHat for Linux 7

https://access.redhat.com/solutions/1355683

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html-single/considerations_in_adopting_rhel_8/index

Posted on

Build a Highly Available cluster for Centos/Redhat with pacemaker

With the latest version of pcs package there are some changes regarding the implementation of a highly available cluster which is based on centos/redhat operating system. Currently the latest package available for pcs is the 0.10.4 as shown below on which cluster with pacemaker 2.x and corosync 3.x are supported.

pcs package version

Firstly authenticate the nodes of the cluster (changed from previous versions)

Create and enable cluster on both nodes

Check cluster status after the creation and the online nodes.

Enable cluster on all nodes

Reboot one node to verify cluster functionality and check active nodes. When a node of cluster goes down, cluster is still online because of the second node.

Create a cluster resource of type IPaddr2 in order to support an application/service.

Ping the IP to verify that it is online

Shutdown the node on which cluster resource IPaddr2 is running and verify that IP is still accessible. You can verify during the shutdown and the resource migration from one node to another that icmp package respond is a bit slower. (3ms instead of <1ms)

Verify that cluster resource cluster-ip is online on the second node.