this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
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Ansible Playbook - How do I reverse engineer a running system? (feddit.uk)
submitted 1 week ago by Cyber@feddit.uk to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I have a few VMs and PMs around the house that I'd setup over time and I'd now like to rebuild some, not to mention just simplify the whole lot.

How the hell do I get from a working system to an equivalent ansible playbook without many (MANY) iterations of trial & error - and potentially destroying the running system??

Ducking around didn't really show much so I'm either missing a concept / keyword, or, no-one does this.

Pointers?

TIA

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[–] bushvin@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I would copy the existing system onto a new system:

  1. Update system to the latest packages
  2. Create a new base system using the same distro
  3. Check which packages are not on the new system, add them to your playbook
  4. Install packages on new system
  5. This will take some time. Run a find of all files and pass them to md5sum or sha512sum to get a list of files with their checksum. Compare the list from the old system to the new system.
  6. Update your playbook with these findings. Template is probably the way to go, Lineinfile might be good as well, use copy if nothimg else works.
  7. Check firewall settings and update your playbook.

Anyhow this will take some iterations, but while you have a copy of your ‘production’ system, you can test on your ‘test’ machine until you have the same functionality.

[–] Cyber@feddit.uk 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Hmm, that's not a bad shout actually...

I can fire up VMs to replicate the real system and maybe (depending on space) keep them as a testbed for future mods.

Thanks, good idea.

[–] bushvin@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

I have my moments… 😉 Feel free to pm me if you need more advice.

[–] WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago

oh the find with the hash sum is good advice! I would have done this but manually, maybe with the double commander sync dirs tool.

but also, for configs this might be the best time to move your custom config to ordered dropin files for all things that support it.