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. Both run crond, and node1 has a user student. For a root shell on a node, sudo podman exec -it node1 bash.

Tasks

Schedule logger "EX294 in progress" for student every 2 minutes on the web servers. crontab -l -u student shows it, and after a few minutes journalctl -t student on node1 has the messages.
Add a job to /etc/cron.d/backup on every node that archives /etc at 02:00 every Sunday, as root. The file has the line with root. Then remove it again from the web servers with state: absent; it's gone there, and stays on the database servers.
Deploy a systemd timer cleanup.timer on the database servers that runs a cleanup daily. systemctl list-timers lists it with a next run time.

Hints

ansible.builtin.cron with name, user, minute: "*/2", job; for /etc/cron.d, cron_file and user: root, and weekday: "0".
state: absent finds the job by its name, so use the same one.
A timer is two units: the oneshot service that does the work and the timer with OnCalendar=daily. Enable and start the timer, after daemon_reload: true.