Ansible setup

Ansible - def.  1. super-luminal (aka, faster than light)
                        2. system managment automation program on github you wished you were running

Ansible is set up to be very simple, and runs over ssh.  Here are my notes from trying to get it installed and working on Centos 6.2, using the "Running from Checkout" instructions found at http://ansible.github.com/gettingstarted.html, which gets you version 0.5.  The RPM from EPEL provides version 0.3.

here's my super quick instructions, the few issues I ran into mentioned below:

1. start with CEntOS 6.2
2. sudo su - root or su - root
3. install needed packages
1. # rpm -ivh http://mirror.pnl.gov/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-7.noarch.rpm
2. # yum -y install python PyYAML python-jinja2 python-paramiko
3. # exit
4. add ansible
1. $ git clone git://github.com/ansible/ansible.git
2. $ cd ./ansible 
3. $ source ./hacking/env-setup
5. configure hosts
1. $ echo "127.0.0.1" > ~/ansible_hosts 
2. $ export ANSIBLE_HOSTS=~/ansible_hosts
6. and test:
• $ ansible all -m ping -u dewey.garwood
  127.0.0.1 | success >> {
      "ping": "pong"
  }

you should note the following errors will occur if you aren't paying attention:

• if you go looking for paramiko, yum wont find it; you have to use python-paramiko
• without the -u option in the test command (step 6), ansible tries to use the root user to log in and you end up with:
• $ ansible all -m ping --ask-pass
  SSH password:
  127.0.0.1 | FAILED => FAILED: Authentication failed.