How to develop an Ansible agent for another OS

Archives Ansible Project
1

Hello

I am looking for some docs explaining how to develop an agent for another Operating System

I noticed in

/usr/local/python2.7/dist-packages:ansible/modules-utils/facts/hardware

some files like
aix.py
sunos.py
netbsd.py
linux.py
hpux.py

and so

It seems ansible_distribution may be the name of the OS, according to

https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/2.6/user_guide/playbooks_best_practices.html?highlight=operating%20system

Thanks for any hint

2

Hi,

Could you please explain what you are trying to achieve, so we can guide you?

The existing code supports most common Operating Systems even if their isn’t a specific Python file for that Operating System.

Kind regards,
gundalow

3

Hello

I was trying to port Ansible to OpenVMS Itanium.

Ansible is written in Python, and Python is available for OpenVMS

I thought I had read some time ago some Ansible doc explaining how to deal with another OS, but I can’t find it in the docs.

Regards

4

Hi,
Thanks for the detail.

So, just to clarify some things:

  • ansible-playbook will still be run on a standard Linux machine, that’s the controller

  • Ansible doesn’t have an agent. It communicates over ssh, nothing to install on the remote-node

  • We are talking about supporting OpenVMS/Itanium as a remote-node

Assuming you have an inventory file that defines openvms-01

  1. If we start with the simplest task:
    ansible openvms-01 -m ping

This ensure we have connectivity

  1. Then look at
    ansible openvms-01 -m setup -a ‘gather_subset=!min’

Which should return something like

SUCCESS => {
“ansible_facts”: {
“gather_subset”: [
“!min”
],
“module_setup”: true
},
“changed”: false

You can play around with the various gather_subset as defined on https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/setup_module.html

  1. Then
    ansible openvms-01 -m setup -a ‘gather_subset=min’

How do those commands seem?

If any fail add -vv and rerun

This should give us an indication of what works “out of the box”.

You can see the code for the existing for facts in https://github.com/ansible/ansible/tree/devel/lib/ansible/module_utils/facts

Kind regards,
gundalow

5

Hello

Thanks for your valuable inputs

after setting up SSH between the Linux and OpenVMS node, the

ansible openvms-01 -m ping

succesfully connects to the remote system (via ssh), then
sends
‘/bin/sh -c ‘"’“‘echo ~SYSTEM && sleep 0’”’"‘’

but this is an illegal command on OpenVMS which has a specific shell named DCL.

So, now, how to specifiy a correct command for the OpenVMS host and check the reply.

6

use the 'raw' module:

ansible openvms-01 -m raw -a "command"