this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
58 points (95.3% liked)

Selfhosted

60048 readers
833 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam.

  3. Posts here are to be centered around self-hosting. Please ensure it is clear in your post how it relates to self-hosting.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or git here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title.

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I have a few VMs and PMs around the house that I'd setup over time and I'd now like to rebuild some, not to mention just simplify the whole lot.

How the hell do I get from a working system to an equivalent ansible playbook without many (MANY) iterations of trial & error - and potentially destroying the running system??

Ducking around didn't really show much so I'm either missing a concept / keyword, or, no-one does this.

Pointers?

TIA

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] chrisp@cyberplace.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@Cyber Yeah it's gonna be pretty manual as others have mentioned. Some areas to look at:
- Filesystem provisioning, mounts, etc.
- Packages
- Users, groups
- Time zone, locale language, time format etc.
- /etc/
- /root/ and /home/
- SSH settings
- Services
- Cron jobs/systemd timers

There is a bit of overlap between some of those categories. Some bits are going to see more or less use on VMs vs physical. And remember that in ansible there are built in modules for a lot of functionality.

[โ€“] Cyber@feddit.uk 1 points 1 year ago

Hadn't thought about all the locale, etc.... good point, thanks