Brian Coca recently submitted a jabber module for use with Ansible. This module allows an Ansible playbook to connect to an XMPP service and just push out a message, such as "all's well" or "I'm done", when, say, a Playbook completes. In addition to the `mail' module (created by Dag Wieers and heavily improved upon by yours truly :-), I thought I'd add two more.

The first is a module which fires off a message to an IRC channel.

That was posted to the channel by this play:

---
- hosts: all
  tasks:
  - local_action: irc port=6669 
         channel="#t1"
         msg="Server {{ ansible_hostname }} completed at {{ ansible_date_time.iso8601 }}"
         color=green
         nick=ansibleIRC

The second (very similar) module I created works similarly, but notifies via MQTT. MQTT is the new hotness in the Internet of Things (IoT), and we talked about it here recently. Using this module, Ansible can "notify" by publishing an arbitrary payload to an MQTT topic.

That subscription was published to by this play:

---
- hosts: all
  tasks:
  - local_action: mqtt
                  server=localhost
                  port=1883 
                  topic=service/ansible/{{ ansible_hostname }}
                  payload="Server {{ ansible_hostname }} done at {{ ansible_date_time.iso8601 }}"
                  qos=0
                  retain=false
                  client_id=ans001

(Publishing topics to an MQTT broker would also be a neat way of watching Ansible at work with a callback; maybe another time.)

Blinking dashboards turn me on. Really. I love seeing things move and blink.

Andrew Hazelden's post on monitoring a solar hot water system using a dashboard created in SVG made a deep impression when I saw it, and I've been meaning to experiment with that. As I've been doing things with MQTT, I thought I'd finally give it a try, swiping bits of code created by Robert Hekkers.

What I have is an SVG file which can be updated in real-time using socket.io. A Web browser loads an HTML resource from a Web server. A bit of JavaScript in the page connects to a socket.io process and awaits data. On the other side, we push data into that socket, and the JavaScript tweaks the SVG to make things do "blinkenlights".

The SVG is scalable (the 'S' in SVG'), so I can zoom into it:

I drew the SVG with Inkscape, using its "XML Editor" to change object identifiers to something that makes sense to me. I'll be using the second level of the MQTT topic (e.g. svgdash/smtp0) to name the SVG object.

Furthermore, in the XML, I specify a type for the object: "num" will be a numeric value, and "slider" is a bar with a maximum width of "maxw", which will be displayed to show a particular level. The following example shows a "slider" for an object called "smtp0" (the left-most SMTP server in the SVG). Note the "maxw" and "type" elements I added manually

    <rect
       style="fill:#e0e5de;....."
       id="smtp0"
       width="35.75985"
       height="10.547414"
       x="213.35257"
       y="640.42432"
       inkscape:label="#rect3549"
       type="slider"
       maxw="35" />

An MQTT client publishes to a specific topic, with a JSON payload containing something like this:

{
 "msg" : "ok",
 "status" : 0,
 "level" : 4193
}

The "msg" is a string which should probably be displayed on the SVG object. (Here I show it on the top left.) "status" is a Nagios/Icinga-type status (OK, WARNING, CRITICAL). "level" is used to fill objects of type "slider" or to post literally as text on objects of type "num". You get the idea. I hope.

If I add a component to the network, I simply choose a new topic, update the SVG, refresh the Web page, and that's it. Nice. Of course, if I were half a designer/developer, I could use something like the beautiful Raphaël to do this "electrically".

The code I have is up for grabs, so do feel free to improve on this. Enjoy!

Update: watch the blinkenlights

iCurlHTTP is a nifty little program for iOS, which will shoot off an HTTP GET or HEAD request.

Nice for testing.

via Daniel Stenberg

You are a UNIX/Linux administrator, and you use SSH? Print this out, get yourself a nice drink, make yourself comfortable, and read Managing SSH Keys for Automated Access - Current Recommended Practice.

Do it now.

He's talking about this book. :)