Lab 6.1 - Brief overview of our Ansible setup

In this lesson we will look at a high-level overview of our Ansible setup. We’ll also view what ASM policies currently exist on the BIG-IP and what ASM policy, if any, is associated with the hackazon_virtual virtual server.

Task 1 - Inventory, playbooks, ansible.cfg

1. SSH to the Xubuntu Server using the PuTTY shortcut that can be found on the desktop.

2. Perform the following command to change the directory to the f5-ansible directory.

   cd f5-ansible

3. Perform the following command to view the contents of the directory.

   ls -l

   You’ll see output similar to the following screenshot:

   

4. You’ll see the inventory directory, the playbooks directory, and the ansible.cfg file.

   • Inventory - this is where we store our hosts file. The hosts file is where you store the hosts that we will target when executing our playbooks. In our case this is the BIG-IP at 10.1.1.245.
   • Playbooks - this is where we store our playbooks which are used to deploy the code we’ve written to execute on our BIG-IP.
   • ansible.cfg - this is the configuration file for various settings to use with Ansible.

Task 2 - View ASM policies and view there are no ASM policies associated with hackazon_virtual virtual server

1. In your web browser, navigate to BIG-IP: https://10.1.1.245/

2. Navigate to Main > Security > Application Security > Security Policies

   

   You’ll notice the only policy that exists is the one you created in Lab5, iControlLX_Agility2018.

3. Navigate to Main > Local Traffic > Virtual Servers > Virtual Server List

4. Select hackazon_virtual then navigate to Security > Policies

   

   Note

   You’ll see there is no security policy attached to the virtual server. In the following sections we will attach a policy to the virtual server using Ansible.