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10.10 Journal: the machines describe themselves now

Make a permanent note. In your vault, create Projects/lab-automation.md and record:

  • Where your Ansible repository lives, both on UBNT01 and in Gitea
  • The virtual environment convention: ~/ansible/.venv, activated with source .venv/bin/activate, rebuilt from requirements.txt. Write this down, because "command not found" a month from now is otherwise ten minutes of confusion.
  • What each playbook does, in one line each
  • Which groups exist in your inventory and what is in them
  • For Tier 2: your Kerberos realm in capitals, and the fact that clock skew is the first thing to check

Then today's daily note​

Under what I did: what you automated, and what you deliberately did not.

Under what broke: this module has two clusters of failure and yours will be in one of them. Either a playbook that did something you did not intend, which is a reading failure, or Kerberos, which is a configuration failure. Both are worth writing down specifically, because the Kerberos one in particular is something you will meet again and will not remember the fix for.

Under what I learned: pick one and write it in your own words.

  • Why changed=0 on a second run is the whole point rather than a detail
  • What the rebuild in 10.8 revealed that your playbooks did not cover
  • Why staging in Git matters more for a repository that configures machines than for one holding notes

Under open questions: this module leaves good ones. How would you test a playbook before it touched anything real? Where does the machine's existence get described, rather than its configuration? And the one lesson 10.9 only half answers: it showed you how to schedule a playbook, but at what point would you actually trust one to run unattended? Write down where you think you are on that three-step progression today.

That last one is provisioning, and it is the honest edge of what this course covers.

The rebuild list​

Lesson 10.8 had you write down what a machine would need if it vanished, then find the gaps. Put that list in the permanent note, with the gaps marked.

It is the most valuable artefact in this module. It is a tested statement about what you can and cannot recover, and almost nobody has one.

Then close the loop:

cd ~/git/lab-journal
git status
git add -A
git commit -m "journal: module 10 complete"
git push

Tick Module 10 in Projects/lab-progress.md.

And commit the automation repository too, which is now a separate thing you maintain:

cd ~/ansible
git status
git add -A
git commit -m "ansible: module 10 complete"
git push

Two repositories, two habits, same rhythm.