Gain insights into installing and using Ansible, delve into playbooks and inventory management, and learn about troubleshooting to efficiently automate IT tasks and enhance your IT career.

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In an era of IT environments, automation is no longer a luxury—it's a necessity. Ansible, an open-source IT automation tool, has become a go-to solution for streamlining IT tasks. This comprehensive course aims to equip you with both fundamental and advanced Ansible knowledge.

You'll start by installing Ansible, understanding its architecture, and diving into inventory management and playbook creation. Next, you'll explore variables, conditional statements, loops, handlers, roles, and collections. After that, the course dives into Ansible for Linux-specific tasks and troubleshooting techniques to resolve common problems like connection failures, missing parameters, and syntax errors. 

After completing this course, you'll have gained a robust understanding of Ansible, with the ability to create efficient playbooks, manage inventory, troubleshoot common problems, and automate a wide range of IT tasks. These skills will provide a strong foundation for a thriving career in IT infrastructure management.

Automating IT Infrastructure with Ansible

# Connection-related errors

Connection failed errors are one of the most common Ansible problems and are very annoying.
The root cause of these types of problems might be the networking connection, firewall, some SSH configuration parameter, or even a misspelled Ansible hostname in our Ansible inventory.


The outcome is a fatal connection failed error, and we often see a "failed to connect" or "operation timed out" message on our execution log via the `ansible-playbook` command-line tool, as shown in the figure below.





When dealing with virtual machines, we verify the connection of the virtual network card and if the SSH service is enabled in the firewall.
A manual SSH connection to the target host test might be useful for the connection test.

# Example: Misspelled hostname

Let's now simulate and solve misspelled hostname as the target machine.
Imagine that a hostname is `localhost`, which has been misspelled as `localehost` with an extra *e* in the hostname. This is a trivial and frequent error.
The wrong Ansible `ansible_connection` variable is also used.
For `localhost`, the target is expected to be set to `local` instead of `ssh`. The `ssh` parameter uses the OpenSSH connection, whereas the `local` parameter uses the local connection.

The following Ansible inventory shows the misspelled target hostname:

Learn how to troubleshoot and solve the connection failed error.

Getting Started

Ansible Language

Ansible for Linux

Ansible Troubleshooting

Appendix: Ansible Installation

Conclusion

Connection Failed

Connection-related errors