Lab 1 links and tips

[Alex Cohen]

Going forward I am probably going to post some links I find that explain how to set up the stuff we need to do in each of the labs.

For your linux distro I would recommend a version of Ubuntu, I find that there is way more info out there for Ubuntu than there is for CentOS. Personally I recommend Lubuntu, which is Ubuntu that is designed to run super fast on any computer no matter how slow or old it is.  Here's a link for the iso:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Lubuntu/GetLubuntu

I've also heard good things about Xubuntu, but haven't used it myself:
http://xubuntu.org/getxubuntu/

First of all, in the lab it says you should set up a lab network with vyatta or PFSense, but if you are using VMWare you DON'T have to do that.  
When you go into Edit Virtual Machine Settings > Network Adapter  you will see the option for a NAT connection, this sets up a lab network space within your computer with NAT, DNS and DHCP automatically up and working.  So if you choose NAT for all your machines they will all automatically get IP addresses and be in their own private network.
To see more info about the NAT network go into Edit > Virtual Network Editor > NAT > DHCP Settings or DNS Settings.


Most of part 2 is basic user stuff, the only thing you might not know how to do off the top of your head is how to add a user to the sudo group with this command, replace obama with whatever you decided to use as his username:
sudo usermod -aG sudo obama

For part 3 you will be using ansible, here's a good video that teaches you how to use it and how to write playbooks, which are ansibles automation scripts.
https://youtu.be/xMHVvHZ-Zn4?t=366

The video uses ansible with a remote cloud server but to do stuff on the local one, you probably wont need an ssh key just yet and you just replace the IP addresses with 127.0.0.1 in the hosts file or in your playbook use this as your header:


---
- hosts: 127.0.0.1

  tasks:


Two quick tips about playbooks if you want to use them: make them .yml files not .yaml and you can't use tab anywhere in your .yml file to indent stuff so you must do indentation with lots of spaces

To test that ansible is idempotent a good solution is to just move a file or make one somewhere in your machine, the first time you run your playbook ansible with make the changes and tell you that the changes were made, then if you try and run the same playbook again ansible will recognize that the changes were already made and it will not do it again and it will tell you that 0 changes were made.