Ansible #3: Finishing our Ansible playbook to manage workstation and server updates

In part two of this series on writing Ansible playbooks, “Ansible #2 How to create an Ansible Playbook,” we examined the task of installing updates for servers and workstations. This playbook is intended to manage updates differently depending on the role the systems play on the network. Last time we created the play designed to install updates on the Ansible hub. This time we add two more plays; one to install updates on the servers and another to install updates on the regular workstations.

Regular Expressions #1: Introduction

Regular expressions don’t have to invoke anxiety and fear, although they do for many of us. The function of regular expressions is to provide a highly flexible tool for matching strings of characters in a stream of data. When a match is found, the program’s action can be as simple as to pass the line of data in which it’s found on to STDOUT, or as copmplex as replacing that string with another.