Computer configuration management

Configuring your devices is boring, disgusting and complex. Specially when your device dies and you need to reinstall. You usually don't have the time or energy to deal with it, you just want it to work.

To have a system that allows you to recover from a disaster it's expensive in both time and knowledge, and many people have different solutions.

This article shows the latest step of how I'm doing it.

Linux devices⚑

Operating System installation⚑

I don't use PEX or anything, just burn the ISO in an USB and manually install it.

Main skeleton⚑

I use the same Ansible playbook to configure all my devices. Using a monolith playbook is usually not a good idea in enterprise environments, you'd better use a cruft template and a playbook for each server. At your home you'd probably have a limited number of devices and maintaining many playbooks and a cruft template is not worth your time. Ansible is flexible enough to let you manage the differences of the devices while letting you reuse common parts.

The playbook configures the skeleton of the device namely:

• Configure the disks with OpenZFS.
• Install the packages.
• Configure the firewall.

In that playbook I use roles in these ways:

• The ones that can be cloned without configuration from a clean environment are defined in the requirements.yml file and installed with ansible-galaxy.
• The ones that can't be cloned but are developed by other people are cloned using git submodules in the roles directory.
• The ones I make live in the roles directory of the playbook and don't have tests. Again, managing your own roles this way is a bad idea in enterprise environments, you should use cruft, a separate repository for each role, test them with molecule and version it in the requirements.yml of the playbook pinning it to a specific version. This of course is an overkill for a home deployment. You'd spend much more time writing the tests and debugging issues than using the roles directory directly.

Home configuration⚑