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2025

  • 7 min read

Ansible Molecule

Molecule is part of the Ansible project. It's effectively a way to orchestrate containers or VM's to automate the testing of roles and collections in various environments. For example, using Docker with custom Dockerfiles or QEMU with Vagrant templates, to build the environments to run roles on. Combining this with CI workflows in GitHub or GitLab allows you to automate the process.

Use Cases

In theory molecule could be used to automate the testing of really anything within a container or VM as long as the playbook is configured to handle it.

This post tries to fill in any blanks between what the documentation doesn't need to say, and what you'll see when reviewing public examples of projects using molecule. There are a few areas where it's not immediately clear "what" or "how", so this post will be a point of reference from that perspective. Once you see it working and are interacting with it, it all makes sense.

  • 17 min read

Network Commands

This post is meant to be a single point of reference for all of the random ways of interacting with and diagnosing network(s) from a machine.

It was started after spending a significant amount of time working in packer, across both the Debian and Red Hat family OS's. There are so many ways to handle networking it's hard to remember these notes when I don't have access to them, and each tool had a dedicated page that has been built upon for 5+ years. Porting each of these notes to this page is an opportunity to clean up, review, and expand on each tool (and add new ones).

As of the latest update, this includes Linux (Debian / RedHat), BSD (pfSense), and Windows.

  • 2 min read

rsync

The fast, versatile, remote (and local) file-copying tool. It operates using deltas and by looking at properties to only update parts of files that have changed, making it incredibly efficient and invaluable as a part of a regular or scheduled backup operation. I have used this tool to ensure local, remote, and external copies of directories are in sync, or to identify what has changed.