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RHEL-Patchmanagement

Patchmanagement for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server.

Use Case

In our environment we deploy RHEL-Servers for our departments to run their applications.

This role was written to provide a mechanism to install Red Hat Advisories on target nodes once a month. The Sysadmin could choose which Advisories should be installed, e.g. RHSA, RHBA and/or RHEA.

In our special use case only RHSA are installed to ensure a minimum limit of security. The installation is enforced once a month. The advisories are summarized in "Patch-Sets". This way it is ensured that the same advisories are used for all stages during a patch cycle.

In the Ansible Inventory nodes are summarized in one of the following groups which define when a node is scheduled for the patch installation:

  • [rhel-patch-phase1] - on the second Tuesday of a month
  • [rhel-patch-phase2] - on the third Tuesday of a month
  • [rhel-patch-phase3] - on the fourth Tuesday of a month
  • [rhel-patch-phase4] - on the fourth Wednesday of a month

In case packages were updated on target nodes the hosts will reboot afterwards.

Because the production systems are most important, they are divided into two separate groups (phase3 and phase4) to decrease the risk of failure and service downtime due to advisory installation.

Of course you could choose which hosts to put in which phase and the day you want to run a patch cycle. Feel free do adjust the role to your needs.

A Bash script is used to trigger the playbook which runs the Patch-Management at the due date.

Once the role is setup the RHEL-Patchmanagement runs fully automated. Please feel free to use the issue tracker to ask questions about the usage of the role or the role itself and report bugs you may find.

How to get the advisory information?

To retrieve the advisory information and to create a patch set in vars/main.yml you have to run the script create_vars.sh.

For further information about the advisories you could subscribe to the Red Hat Advisory Notifications from Customer Portal or use the yum updateinfo list all command to get the advisory information.

Role Variables

The role variables in vars/main.yml are set automatically by the script create_vars.sh which is triggered by cron.

Example Playbook

Including an example of how to use your role (for instance, with variables passed in as parameters) is always nice for users too:

  • hosts: all

    tasks:

    • name: Group by OS group_by: key=os_{{ ansible_distribution }} changed_when: False

  • hosts: os_RedHat roles:

    • rhel_patchmanagement

How to use this role

Please be aware that the following howto is considered to work with the use case described above. You may have to adjust some sort of things if you have a different use case. I assume that you have already cloned this repo or downloaded all the necessary files. After that you have to do the following steps to get the RHEL-Patchmanagement to work.

  1. Edit run_rhel_patch_mgmt.sh and insert the ssh-private-key which is used to connect to your nodes.
  2. Create a cronjob which runs run_rhel_patch_mgmt.sh on every Tuesday and Wednesday at a chosen time. The script will trigger the ansible playbook at the times as mentioned in the use case above. You could adjust it to your needs.
  3. You may have to edit patch_rhel.yml to fit your needs. By default this playbook runs on all hosts of your inventory which have a Red Hat operating system installed and which are member of the corresponding rhel-patch-phaseX group.
  4. Rename variables.txt.example to variables.txt and edit the file accordingly to fit your environment.
  5. Edit create_vars.sh and set source to the abolute path for the variables.txt file.
  6. Rename variables.py.example to variables.py and edit the file to specify the absolute path to your ansible inventory file.
  7. Per default create_vars.sh runs on the first Tuesday of month to create a new vars/main.yml file with a current patch set and the file mail_text.txt.
  8. You could use the function send_mail to send a notification automatically to a specified email address. This function is enabled by default.
  9. Optional: You may use the content of mail_text.txt to notify your users which advisories are going to be installed.

License

MIT

Author Information

  • Original: Joerg Kastning <joerg(dot)kastning(at)uni-bielefeld(dot)de>