linuxexpert-practice-labs/labs/ex294/9-1-packages-and-repositories/README.md

EX294 9.1: Packages and repositories

Give the managed nodes their repositories, install packages and a group on the right hosts, and bring the web servers up to date.

Before you start

This VM is the control node. The lab creates the user greg (password Lab-Pass-1) with an SSH key, and installs ansible-core. Work as greg, in /home/greg/ansible: its ansible.cfg reads the inventory inventory, logs in as devops and becomes root. node1 is in the group webservers and node2 in dbservers.

The managed nodes node1 (10.99.1.11) and node2 (10.99.1.12) are AlmaLinux 10 containers, prepared as in chapter 3.1: devops takes greg's key and may use sudo without a password, so ansible all -m ping works straight away. The lab has taken away every repository on both nodes (the old files are in /root/repos.orig), and left one package on node1 a version behind. For a root shell on a node, sudo podman exec -it node1 bash.

Tasks

1. Configure BaseOS and AppStream repositories on every node, with signature checking, from URLs you choose (the AlmaLinux 10 mirrors at https://repo.almalinux.org/almalinux/10/, for example). dnf repolist on each node lists both, and dnf install works.
2. In one playbook, install a package group on the database servers, and php and mariadb on the web servers.
3. Upgrade every package on the web servers, so dnf check-update there finds nothing to update.

Hints

• ansible.builtin.yum_repository with baseurl, gpgcheck: true and gpgkey; ansible.builtin.rpm_key imports the key. The key is at https://repo.almalinux.org/almalinux/RPM-GPG-KEY-AlmaLinux-10. rpm_key needs gpg2; the lab installed gnupg2 on the nodes before it took their repositories away.
• A group is name: "@Group Name" in ansible.builtin.dnf; dnf group list --hidden on a node shows the names. A group of only optional packages installs nothing.
• name: "*" with state: latest updates everything.
• Check with ansible all -a 'dnf repolist' and ansible webservers -a 'rpm -q php mariadb'.