Part 3: Ansible in Action — Automating Everyday Admin Tasks

With a solid grasp of playbook structure and reusability, it’s time to apply those skills to real-world scenarios. In this part, we’ll explore how to automate common admin tasks using some of Ansible’s most useful built-in modules.

Creating Users

Creating users manually across multiple servers is time-consuming. With Ansible:

- name: Create a local user
  user:
    name: automation_user
    state: present
    shell: /bin/bash

Managing Services

Ensure essential services are enabled and running:

- name: Ensure UFW is running
  service:
    name: ufw
    state: started
    enabled: true

Scheduling Tasks with Cron

Automate recurring jobs like backups using the cron module:

- name: Schedule daily backup
  cron:
    name: "daily-backup"
    user: root
    job: "/usr/local/bin/backup.sh"
    minute: "0"
    hour: "2"

Managing Files and Configs

You can copy static config files or templates across machines:

- name: Copy NTP config
  copy:
    src: ntp.conf
    dest: /etc/ntp.conf
    owner: root
    group: root
    mode: '0644'

Gathering Facts About Systems

Use Ansible to collect info like OS type, memory, etc.:

- name: Gather system facts
  ansible.builtin.setup:

Print specific values with debug:

- name: Show memory info
  debug:
    msg: "Memory: {{ ansible_memtotal_mb }} MB"

Bringing It All Together

Here’s an example playbook that uses everything above:

---
- name: Automate daily tasks
  hosts: home_servers
  become: true
  tasks:
    - name: Create user
      user:
        name: devops
        state: present

    - name: Install UFW
      apt:
        name: ufw
        state: present

    - name: Enable UFW
      service:
        name: ufw
        state: started
        enabled: true

    - name: Schedule cleanup
      cron:
        name: cleanup
        user: root
        job: "/usr/local/bin/cleanup.sh"
        hour: "3"
        minute: "0"

Recap

In this post, you learned how to use Ansible to:

• Create local users
• Manage services
• Schedule cron jobs
• Copy config files
• Gather system facts

These are tasks sysadmins perform daily — and now you can automate them confidently.

---

Coming Up Next

In Part 4, we’ll organize everything into roles, use templates to generate configs, and keep your projects maintainable as they grow.

Let’s keep building your Ansible toolkit!