Attaining the desired state with Ansible pull

We used to run Ansible pull across 500+ servers to maintain a consistent image across all servers. It happens many times that a system administrator flushes iptables if things are not working or stops OSSEC if it blocks scans.

This leads to a lot of unexpected configurations everywhere, and during an audit period, OSSEC may be disabled in a few servers from the past few weeks.

So, our entire hardening stack was based on Ansible pull that used to run at midnight on all servers. If there were any configuration changes, then Ansible would update it back to the original consistent state.

This is extremely useful and makes the auditors smile as well.

Auditing servers with Ansible notifications

Ansible works very well in integrating Ansible playbooks with notification services such as emails as well as integration with other services such as HipChat and Slack.

This great set of integration proves to be very useful in auditing the current infrastructure.

Let...