ansible-mail-infra/README.md

ansible-mail-infra

Set up infrastructure for all things e-mail

Prep

On your Ansible controller make sure the sshpass binary exists if Ansible has to connect to target machines via SSH username-password authentication instead of SSH key authentication. The binary usually comes with a package of the same name.

We're assuming that you're running Ansible as a Python package inside a virtual environment. Install Ansible like so:

pip install ansible

We're also assuming that secrets are stored in a HashiCorp Vault instance to which you have access. These role access Vault via hvac, the HashiCorp Vault API client for Python 3.x, see github.com/hvac/hvac for reference. Install it like so:

pip install hvac

Vars

• For default variables copy ansible/roles/20-common-20-ssh/defaults/main.yml.example to a proper ansible/roles/20-common-20-ssh/defaults/main.yml, adjust as needed.

• Create your inventory, copy ansible/hosts.yml.example to a proper ansible/hosts.yml file with at least one host in host group all.

• Replace ansible/group_vars/all/vars.yml.example with a proper ansible/group_vars/all/vars.yml file and set at least ansible_user and Vault access variables.

• In ansible/roles/20-common-20-ssh/files/root/.ssh copy both authorized_keys.example and known_hosts.example to proper files. They contain SSH authorized_keys and public SSH host keys you want installed on target machines.

Vault structure

In Vault we're assuming that every host in your inventory has a secret stored that contains at least the following keys:

• initial_password: The operating system's local account password at machine creation. Ansible will use this to SSH into the machine during first_run, see section Run it below.
• password: The new password you want to set for the operating system's local account.
• password_salt: The salt you're going to use. We're hashing the password with SHA-512, the salt is a string of up to 16 characters length.

For an example server fully.qualified.domain.name and example user root Vault secrets are located at name/domain/qualified/fully/os/root/creds. Per ansible/group_vars/all/vars.yml.example the default secrets engine mount point is kv where this playbook expects a kv secrets engine.

Run it

On first run execute it like so:

ansible-playbook --tags 'first_run' --inventory hosts.yml playbook.yml

The first_run tag ensures that ansible_password variable gets set which in turn causes Ansible to log in to target machines via SSH username-password authentication.

On subsequent runs like so:

ansible-playbook --inventory hosts.yml playbook.yml