TACACS

Here is my first post about modules. In that post I built what I’d call a legacy module, something to include in a basic playbook to prove a concept worked. Ansible has moved on and is now pushing content collections. This post will detail moving my module to a content collection. Content Collections Ansible content collections, as I understand them, are a way to group custom functionality into something that is unique. The problem with modules is the names could overlap, with content collections they cannot. Content collections also add roles and plugins, so you can collapse a bunch of different ansible functionality into one area to include. ...

I have been doing a lot of ISE deployments lately. One of my customers is doing a TACACS only implementation of ISE. I have also been studying up on Ansible and trying to use it in real world scenarios. One idea I’ve come up with is using Ansible to test ISE TACACS policies before actually using the real gear. The first part of this was trying to find a python module that can interact with TACACS. Thankfully, Ansible itself has a github repo with such a module called tacacs_plus. This module actually contains a standlone client which is pretty nice in on it’s own, but naturally I want to shoehorn this into Ansible. ...