# Ansible capable of handling diskless clients?

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/ansible-capable-of-handling-diskless-clients/18327>\
**Category:** Ansible Project\
**Created:** [May 28, 2015, 7:24am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/ansible-capable-of-handling-diskless-clients/18327 "2015-05-28T07:24:51Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Uwe\_Sauter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/41988e/32.png) [@Uwe\_Sauter](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Uwe_Sauter)\
**Post date:** [May 28, 2015, 7:24am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/ansible-capable-of-handling-diskless-clients/18327/1 "2015-05-28T07:24:51Z")

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Hi all,

a similar question was already posted on Serverfault  
([http://serverfault.com/questions/693698/config-management-for-nfs-root-cluster](http://serverfault.com/questions/693698/config-management-for-nfs-root-cluster)) but got turned down as being off-topic.

To summarize:

Is Ansible capable of handling diskless clients that only have read-only storage mounted (besides a TMPFS mount)?

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**Author:** ![Brian\_Coca](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/6de8d8/32.png) [@Brian\_Coca](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Brian_Coca)\
**Post date:** [May 28, 2015, 10:18pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/ansible-capable-of-handling-diskless-clients/18327/2 "2015-05-28T22:18:41Z")

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I don't see a reason it would not.

First ansible normally is run in push mode so not much for it to  
manage 'locally'.

Managing services would be the same as with full clients, the issue  
here is handling the per server specific configs and general configs.

Most of this can be done with ansible looking at only the 'master' and  
treating slave configs as a special path. Another option is to have  
ansible know about the slaves and delegate changes for the slaves to  
the master + additional pathing to the correct slave configs.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Uwe\_Sauter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/41988e/32.png) [@Uwe\_Sauter](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Uwe_Sauter)\
**Post date:** [May 29, 2015, 6:58am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/ansible-capable-of-handling-diskless-clients/18327/3 "2015-05-29T06:58:30Z")

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Brian,

thanks for your answer.

As I'm not yet familiar with Ansible, do you have any pointers to documentation where I can find what you described (esp. the last  
point about additional pathing)?

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Brian\_Coca](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/6de8d8/32.png) [@Brian\_Coca](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Brian_Coca)\
**Post date:** [May 29, 2015, 3:23pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/ansible-capable-of-handling-diskless-clients/18327/4 "2015-05-29T15:23:45Z")

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not really, most configs are handled with the copy or template module,  
in the case that you delegate the config to master for 'existing  
hosts' you can do something like this for pathing:

- template: src=httpd.conf.j2  
dest=/slaves/{{inventory\_hostname}}/etc/httpd/httpd.conf  
&nbsp;&nbsp;delegate\_to: master

inventory\_hostname is a variable that contains 'current host'