The Ghost Operator's Signal
The web is noise. The control tower is silent. No tabs, no clicks – only keys.
I don’t use Emacs for nostalgia. I use it because it bends to my will.
Ansible automates. Emacs orchestrates. Together, they form my Ops Terminal.
Posted by DeadSwitch | The Cyber Ghost
“Code is noise until it becomes a weapon.”
“When the mission demands silence, precision is non-negotiable.”
There are tools. And then there are instruments.
Ansible is not just a configuration manager. It’s a scalpel for systems, forged in the fire of chaos and hardened by time. It’s agentless, scriptable, readable -and most of all- silent.
That makes it the perfect weapon in the DeadSwitch arsenal.
Ever written an Ansible role in silence?
Not just code – structured ritual.
Where logic meets discipline.
Where every variable is defined, documented, and deployed – within the same file.
That’s the power of Org Mode.
This is the DeadSwitch way.
There’s a certain kind of silence that comes before precision.
And precision – true, surgical precision – requires the right blade.
For Ansible development, that blade is Emacs.
Not VSCode. Not PyCharm. Not some noisy IDE bloated with plugins.
Just Emacs. Raw. Controlled. Modular.
Managing Podman containers with OpenTofu is a powerful way to automate your containerization workflow. OpenTofu, a fork of Terraform, allows you to manage infrastructure as code, making it easier to create, destroy, and manage your containers effectively.
Continue reading “How to Manage Podman Containers With OpenTofu”
Installing and setting up OpenTofu on Debian Bookworm can be accomplished with a few straightforward steps. OpenTofu is an open-source infrastructure-as-code tool that serves as a drop-in replacement for Terraform, making it a popular choice for managing cloud resources.
Continue reading “How to Install OpenTofu”
OpenTofu is an emerging open-source tool that aims to redefine infrastructure management within the DevOps community. Born from the need for a truly open-source alternative to Terraform, OpenTofu offers a community-driven approach to infrastructure as code (IaC), providing developers and operations teams with a flexible and robust framework for managing cloud resources.
Continue reading “Understanding OpenTofu: A New Era in Infrastructure as Code”
In modern infrastructure automation, working with structured data is essential. YAML, due to its readability and simplicity, is the format of choice for tools like Ansible, Kubernetes, and many others. As your automation tasks grow, you may find yourself needing to dynamically manipulate YAML files – particularly to extend or modify nested data structures.
Continue reading “Managing Complex YAML Structures Dynamically with Ansible”
When managing remote systems with Ansible, tasks are generally executed on target hosts over SSH. However, there are scenarios where you might want to execute certain tasks on the local machine (the control node) instead of the remote hosts. Ansible provides built-in mechanisms for delegating tasks to the local host or other specific hosts while running playbooks remotely.
Continue reading “Delegating Tasks to the Local Host in Ansible While Running Remotely Through SSH”
In today’s security-conscious IT environments, sensitive data like passwords, API keys, and certificates must be handled with care. Ansible offers a solution through Ansible Vault – a feature that allows you to encrypt sensitive information. However, as environments become more complex, managing a single vault can quickly become cumbersome. This is where Ansible Vault IDs come into play, enabling you to manage different tiers of secrets with ease.
Continue reading “Ansible Vault: Multiple Vault IDs for Secure Configuration Management”
Ansible is a powerful automation tool that simplifies the management of IT infrastructure. One of its strengths is the ability to work with dynamic inventories, which allow Ansible to discover and manage systems on-the-fly. When working with a KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) environment, leveraging a dynamic inventory can significantly streamline the management of virtual machines (VMs) throughout their lifecycle.
Continue reading “Using Dynamic KVM Inventories with Ansible for VM Lifecycle and Configuration Management”
In today’s IT world, automation is not just a convenience, it’s a necessity. As organizations scale, managing infrastructure, applications, and services manually becomes impossible. This is where automation and configuration management tools like Ansible come into play. Ansible, with its simple yet powerful automation capabilities, can be used to manage a wide array of IT tasks, including API automation.
Continue reading “Automating APIs with Ansible”
Podman offers a robust network management system that allows for seamless communication between containers. This feature is particularly useful in modern software development, where multiple services often need to interact with each other.
Continue reading “Podman Basics 05: Podman Networks”
After installing Podman you have to know and understand some of the terminology. Understanding the basic jargon of containerization will help you start with this lesson, and it will be beneficial later on too. You will learn about the image registries, images and containers in this lesson. You will take a look at how to pull, run and manage them.
Continue reading “Podman Basics 04: Running Your First Container”
In Ansible, blocks are a powerful feature that allows users to group tasks logically within a playbook, enabling the execution of multiple tasks as a single unit. This functionality significantly enhances the manageability of complex playbooks by breaking them down into smaller, more manageable parts. Blocks not only create logical groups of tasks but also provide a structured approach to handle errors, similar to exception handling in programming languages.
Continue reading “Ansible Basics 11: Blocks”
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