RHCE environment ·

This repository contains a vagrant configuration that describes the infrastructure of nodes that can be used for RHCE exam preparation (EX294). The idea of creating such a similar project in comparison to what's currently available is to provide a set of exercises and solutions that are relevant to the configuration and allow the people preparing for the exam to check the exact steps they need to follow in order to solve them

Exercises

The whole purpose of using this project is to practice. Don't waste time, spin up machines and check out this repository. More content is going to be added soon

Assumptions

Vagrant file has a description of a minimal installation and infrastructure description

Cluster

There are five nodes in total deployed

• 1 control node
• 4 managed nodes

User management

Each managed host can be accessed directly through Vagrant/VirtualBox using root account. Root password is vagrant. On top of that managed hosts are accessible from the controller node with use of ssh

Network

All machines have two network adapters configured. One is used for NAT access and the second one allows hosts to talk to each other. There is a third adapter not used nor configured. It is left in such a state intentionally to allow the users to perform more sophisticated exercises.

Aliases

There are symbolic names associated with each host, here is how the definitions look like

192.168.56.100    controller  controller.example.com
192.168.56.101    managed1    managed1.example.com
192.168.56.102    managed2    managed2.example.com
192.168.56.103    managed3    managed3.example.com
192.168.56.104    managed4    managed4.example.com

Storage

Each managed host has two disks bound to it. One is taken by the system and the second one is spare and meant to be used for educational purposes. The controller node has a single drive attached

How to install

macOS

1. Install homebrew

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

2. Install VirtualBox

brew install --cask virtualbox

3. Install Vagrant

brew install --cask vagrant

4. Check out the repo

git clone https://github.com/mateuszstompor/rhce-environment.git

5. Navigate to the repo

cd rhce-environment

6. Provision

vagrant up --provision

Commonly used commands

Accessing the machines

In order to access control-node execute

vagrant ssh controller

Stopping the machines

vagrant halt

Starting the machines back again

vagrant up

Hello world

In order to test if everything works correctly an ad-hoc command can be used

1. SSH to the control node from your host machine

vagrant ssh controller

2. Create a project directory

mkdir -p helloworld

3. Navigate to the project's directory

cd helloworld

4. Create an inventory file

echo "[servers]" > inventory
for i in {1..4}; do
  echo managed$i >> inventory
done

5. Install ansible

sudo yum install -y ansible

6. Execute ping command which checks connectivity

ansible localhost,servers -i inventory -m ping

You should see something similar to the below output, it's an indication of correctly working infrastructure

localhost | SUCCESS => {
    "changed": false,
    "ping": "pong"
}
managed1 | SUCCESS => {
    "ansible_facts": {
        "discovered_interpreter_python": "/usr/libexec/platform-python"
    },
    "changed": false,
    "ping": "pong"
}
managed3 | SUCCESS => {
    "ansible_facts": {
        "discovered_interpreter_python": "/usr/libexec/platform-python"
    },
    "changed": false,
    "ping": "pong"
}
managed4 | SUCCESS => {
    "ansible_facts": {
        "discovered_interpreter_python": "/usr/libexec/platform-python"
    },
    "changed": false,
    "ping": "pong"
}
managed2 | SUCCESS => {
    "ansible_facts": {
        "discovered_interpreter_python": "/usr/libexec/platform-python"
    },
    "changed": false,
    "ping": "pong"
}

Inspirations

• RHCE_ENV
• ansible8env