Without exactly knowing what you want to do, my recommendation is to use CentOS6 as your 'command and control' server. Chances are you want this system (or systems) to be well-secured and dedicated only for this purpose. And maybe you don't want any 3rd party packages just to be secure.
So reinstalling the CentOS5 server you had foreseen for this to CentOS6 is probably worthwhile, and aligned to what most (running CentOS) are doing anyway.
CentOS 6 is not officially released by the data center I have to work with. So this is at this time no option.
I feel your pain 
Let's see what we can do to make it easier on RHEL5.
I feel your pain
Thanks…
Let’s see what we can do to make it easier on RHEL5.
Yes lets make things easier and/or just let us provide a rpm.
Hi,
Had time today to try to get ansible 0.8 stable running from source. Here is what I did, which will help beginners most probably. It is based on a minimal installation of Cenots 5.8. Anyway a rpm would be still nice to provide.
=== CentOS 5 ===
==== From Source ====
Configure EPEL repo
wget ‘http://ftp-stud.hs-esslingen.de/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm’
rpm -ivh epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
Install some packages
yum install python26 python26-PyYAML python26-paramiko python26-jinja2 rpm-build asciidoc libxslt git vim-enhanced
Get the newest stable release
git clone https://github.com/ansible/ansible.git
cd ansible/
git checkout tags/0.8
Add PATH and sourcing to ‘’~/.bash_profile’’
#PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin
PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH
source ~/ansible/hacking/env-setup
Create fake bin directory for python
mkdir /root/bin
cd /root/bin
ln -s $(which python26) python
‘’‘Logout and login again.’‘’
Check your PATH
/root/ansible/bin:/root/bin:/usr/kerberos/sbin:/usr/kerberos/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
‘’/root/bin’’ should be before the system pathes to the binaries as above.
Try ansible
ansible --help
I'll have a look and see if I can spin up a Centos 5 rpm, although its
not something I would use myself (policy now is that new stuff should go
onto C6 since C5 deployment for new stuff means lining ourselves up for
a C5->C6 transition down the line... and I'm lazy in that I will happily
do more work now to avoid work in the future).
As ansible is a new setup for us, its going on C6 when we move to
production. I may manage C5 environments with ansible, although I'm
currently thinking more in terms of moving management of C5 services to
ansible at the point where we transition services to C6 
Nigel.