Ansible - timesync made easy

Keeping the time in sync for all your hosts with multiple major versions of one operating system can be challenging. Luckily, there's the linux-system-roles.timesync-role which will take care of pretty much everything using ansible.

First, let's add the roles/requirements.yml file and install the role:

 [archy@ansible01 ~]$ vim roles/requirements.yml

 ---  
 - src: https://github.com/linux-system-roles/timesync.git  
   scm: git  
   name: linux-system-roles.timesync  
 ...

 [archy@ansible01 ~]$ ansible-galaxy role install -r roles/requirements.yml -p ./roles/ --force

Now with the roles being present, create a playbook that will use the role and run on every host on your inventory. I'll just extend my base-playbook which will do basic configurations on all systems:

 [archy@ansible01 ~]$ vim deploy_base.yml

 - hosts: all:!ipa[0-9][0-9].archyslife.lan  
   user: ansible-executor  
   become: true  
   gather_facts: true  
   vars:  
     timesync_ntp_servers:  
       - hostname: ipa01.archyslife.lan  
         minpoll: 6
         maxpoll: 10
         iburst: true  
         pool: false  
       - hostname: ipa02.archyslife.lan  
         minpoll: 6
         maxpoll: 10
         iburst: true  
         pool: false  
     timesync_dhcp_ntp_servers: false
     timesync_min_sources: 1  
     timesync_ntp_provider: chrony  
   roles:  
     - linux-system-roles.timesync

I'm excluding my ipa-servers here since they will be the source for the environment and should not be configured as a chrony client. At the next run, all servers will be configured to use chrony as the timesync daemon and utilize both ipa-servers as timesources.

Feel free to comment and / or suggest a topic.

Comments

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