Ansible EX407V27 Exam Preparation: Configuring motd

The goal of this task will be configuring a welcome message per host group, each message will be different.

• Ansible installed, version 2.7 is preferred
• One ‘ansible’ user configured, with sudo privileges and passwordless access to all managed hosts
• 1 ansible-control node
• 3 managed-nodes

Our inventory file should look something like this:

[group1]
managed-node1

[group2]
managed-node2

[group3]
managed-node3

In the same directory where our inventory is, let’s create our main playbook:

touch setmotd.yml
vim setmotd.yml

The content of the main playbook will look something similar to this:

---
- hosts: all
  become: true
  tasks:
    - name: Setting motd file for group 1
      copy:
        dest: /etc/motd
        content: "Welcome to Group 1\n"
      when: "'group1' in group_names"

    - name: Setting motd file for group 2
      copy:
        dest: /etc/motd
        content: "Welcome to Group 2\n"
      when: "'group2' in group_names"

    - name: Setting motd file for group 3
      copy:
        dest: /etc/motd
        content: "Welcome to Group 3\n"
      when: "'group3' in group_names"

As you can see in the code above, this playbook runs in all hosts in our inventory with become true enabled. Then it’ll use the copy module to create a file in /etc/motd with the desired content, this file will only be created when our when statement is met.

“If group1 is defined in the group names, then place this line of text”. Run your playbook with the following command:

ansible-playbook setmotd.yml

Once the playbook is done running, ssh to one of the 3 managed-nodes and you should see your welcome message set.

[ansible@ansible-control ~]$ ssh managed-node2
Last login: Tue Mar 24 19:22:53 2020 from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
Welcome to Group 2

There you have it. That was the last bit of configuration needed. In the upcoming days I’ll be posting more practice exercises for EX407, so stay tuned.