Ansible – My Journey – Part 4

Client Setup and First Playbook

In order for Ansible to communicate with a windows device, the device must have some settings changed. The easiest way is to run a powershell script. This script has options you can set during execution, for this example I will run the script as is on my test machine.

Run the following command on the client to verify if client is setup for winrm correctly

winrm get winrm/config

Under the /etc/ansible/ directory create a windows_playbook folder

mkdir /etc/ansible/windows_playbook

Create a file called updatecheck.yml in the /etc/ansible/windows_playbook

vim /etc/ansible/windows_playbook/updatecheck.yml

For this playbook we are going to check if windows updates are available. I cannot take credit for the whole whole playbook. I did a ton of searching for the information that is included. This playbook will prompt for what hosts group you want. What you type should match the host group name and also the same group_vars file that was created.

---
- vars_prompt:
    - name: "host"
      prompt: "Which Host"
      private: no

  hosts: "{{ host }}"
  gather_facts: false
  tasks:
  - name: Check for missing updates
    win_updates:
      category_names:
        - Updates
        - SecurityUpdates
        - CriticalUpdates
        - UpdateRollups
        - DefinitionUpdates
        - WindowsDefender
        - Drivers
        - Tools
      state: searched
    register: found_updates
  - name: List missing updates
    debug: var=found_updates

Run the playbook via the following command

ansible-playbook /etc/ansible/windows_playbook/updatecheck.yml

Once you run the playbook you should see the following output indicating if the group has updates or not needed for install. With this information you can create more playbooks to either install specific KB’s or install all pending windows updates.