Making your servers do your bidding

As server administrators, we're control freaks. There are few things more exciting than executing a command and having every single server obey it and carry it out. Now that we have Ansible set up, that's exactly what we're going to do. I'm assuming by now you have some machines you want to configure, and they're all set up to communicate via SSH with your central server. Also, as I mentioned before, I highly recommend you utilize something like Git to store your configuration files, but that's not required for this section.

Setting up an inventory file and configuring Ansible settings

First, we'll need an inventory file, which is a special text file Ansible expects to find that tells it where to find servers to connect to. By default, the name of this file is simply hosts and Ansible expects to find this file in the /etc/ansible directory.

There's actually a way to avoid needing to create...