[vcf-midatlantic] What projects are you working on?

[Andrew Diller]

Jameel- the group I work (play?) with has done this for IRIX, and it's very, very cool. Ansible is a perfect way to establish a 'known good state' esp on 90's era UNIX workstations as they often payed little attention to things like security. IRIX leaves every installation on every version with no root password. While using something like this requires some basic UNIX knowledge it's still a great way to show new users what to do- as they can examine the playbooks and just execute the commands themselves in order to learn the proper procedures and sequences of things to do for this systems. 

Anyways, check this out - it has a cool way of using telnet and ftp to bootstrap on the requirements for ansible (sshd and python are the two big ones). And from there it's super easy for people to contribute playbooks for various things.

Example of telnet raw commands (no python or ssh yet!):
https://github.com/unxmaal/irix_ansible/blob/master/roles/bootstrap/tasks/add_ansible_user.yml


Installing the basic packages:
https://github.com/unxmaal/irix_ansible/blob/master/roles/bootstrap/tasks/install_bundles.yml


Main repo:
https://github.com/unxmaal/irix_ansible


This is a very worthwhile endeavor and would be cool to have on say, tru64 or something. If you don't already have a SGI talk to me about getting one and hop on our discord, it's a continuous stream of interesting and fun things to do for these systems.


Even this project is due for an overhaul as we are now able to replace the old packages we use here (necoware) with the new RSE packages we've been developing and are now ready for use.

-andy


From: vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic-bounces at lists.vcfed.org>
Date: Tuesday, December 29, 2020 at 10:33 AM
To: vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic at lists.vcfed.org>
Cc: Jameel Akari <jakari at bithose.com>
Subject: Re: [vcf-midatlantic] What projects are you working on?
> On Dec 29, 2020, at 9:19 AM, Alexander Jacocks via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic at lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
> 
> Non-vintage, but I also wrote an published an Ansible role to use EntryDNS
> to answer ACME challenges. I really enjoy working with Ansible!
> 

I’ve thought about playbooks for less-common vintage UNIXes.  It’d be nice to be able to just push config onto a fresh base OS without spending hours re-installing and re-configuring every time I want to replace disks or whatever.  And to have that playbook configuration be code-as-documentation.