ANTS Framework

ANTS is a framework to manage and apply macOS and Linux host configurations using Ansible Pull.

The ANTS Framework is developed by the Client Services Team of the University of Basel IT Services and released under the GNU General Public License Version 3.

Ansible is a trademark of Red Hat, Inc..

Introduction

The ANTS Framework consists of the following components:

• A wrapper for Ansible-Pull
• An Ansible Dynamic Inventory Script (MS Active Directory Connector)
• A modular collection of roles ready to be used
• Strong logging integration

Requirements

This project assumes that you are familiar with Ansible , Git and the shell.

Getting started

Installing ants using pip

• Make sure Git is installed on your machine
• Install the latest ants client using pip: pip install ants_client
• Pip will install the ANTS client with a default configuration and put the executable in your path.

Installing ants using macOS .pkg installer

• Download the latest .pkg installer from the releases page
• Execute the installer. This will take care of all dependencies
• A launch daemon will be installed, running ants every 15 minutes. It will trigger after the next restart.

Run ants

• Open your terminal
• Start an ANTS run by typing ants.
• Wait for ANTS to finish, then open another shell. You will see the message of the day.

What happened?

Running ANTS with the default configuration will use ansible-pull to clone the ANTS playbook from a github repository and execute an ansible run.

By default, this will add a message of the day to your macOS or Linux host. Logs of all the runs are stored at /var/log/ants.

Where to go from here?

Look at the configuration

Run ants -h to see all command line options or write your own configuration.

Besides the default configuration file in the ants_client package, ANTS will also look for a local configuration file at /etc/ants/ants.cfg.

Do not modify the default configuration file as it might be overwritten when updating ANTS.

Run other roles

Fork or duplicate our example playbook and change the client configuration to point to your repository. Update main.yml to assign different roles to your hosts.

You can use the default Ansible syntax. You can also use wildcards. Have a look at the Ansible documentation

Add ssh authentication to your repository

Ansible-pull cat clone a git repository using ssh. You can enable this by creating your own private playbook, adding ssh authentication and a read only ssh key to the repository. Configure ANTS to use that key.

By default, ANTS will look for a private key at /etc/ants/id_ants

You can generate a key with ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -N '' -C "ants client" -f /etc/ants/id_ants

By default, ANTS is configured to run with strict host key checking disabled and will add the host key for github.com to your known_hosts file. You should change this in production. To do so, add ssh_stricthostkeychecking = True to your ants.cfg

Add a dynamic inventory source

Ansible supports dynamic inventory scripts. (A json representation of hosts to group mappings.)

You can use scripts to tell ansible-pull which tasks to run on which host. You need an inventory source and a script that can read and return it in the correct format:

By default, ANTS will run a dummy script inventory_default that will just return your hostname belonging to a group named ants-common.

But we also provide inventory_ad which will connect to your Active Directory and return all groups your host is a member of. Just add your configuration to /etc/ants/ants.cfg. Note that read only rights for the Active Directory user are sufficient.

By using a dynamic inventory source, you can assign roles to a host using AD and let ANTS handle the configuration.

Group Layout in Active Directory

The groups in Active Directory must have the same names as the mappings and the variables you want to assign using Ansible. We recommend to keep the groups in a dedicated Organizational Unit to prevent naming collisions.

Nested groups with access restrictions are an easy way to offer rights delegation to other units in your organization.

What else do I need

Nothing. You just set up a configuration management that communicates savely over ssh using your AD and Github.

No additional infrastructure required.

Communication

• Please use the GitHub issue tracker to file issues.
• Please use a GitHub Pull-Request to suggest changes.

Comparison of plain Ansible and Ansible Tower to ANTS

What does ANTS do, that Ansible can not?

• ANTS gives you a set of ready to be used roles for typical macOS and Linux host configurations.
• ANTS let's you utilize Active Directory to map computers to roles. With all it's delegation and nesting features.
• ANTS utilizes Ansible Pull and therefore does not require an active network connection to a central server. Roles will be locally applied even if the host is offline.

What does Ansible or Ansible Tower do that ANTS does not?

• Tower has a nice Dashboard
• Tower has a real time job output and push-button job runs
• Tower can to job scheduling
• Tower supports run-time job promoting
• Tower supports workflows
• Ansbile can use encrypted secrets using Vault
• Ansible and Tower do offer Enterprise Support