raspberry-pi-dramble VS ansible-job-report

https://www.pidramble.com - but you do need to power the router. 5th port is an uplink

Don't bother. Just put them on an open stack and blow a quiet Noctua fan sideways through the stack. I used to have a four-pi4 cluster ala https://www.pidramble.com and one fan blowing back to front was easily good enough. I also removed the fans from the official PoE HATs since they sounded like rocket engines no matter what I did.

There's no rack, it's simply on the corner of my desk. I haven't made photos of it but it looks pretty much like Jeff Geerling's Dramble: https://www.pidramble.com/

Had a pi 'dramble' just like this one and it worked fine. I ran k3s at the time on it. Since it was a lab experimentation thing, I didn't throw more hardware at it, but I could have likely gotten similar results with a bunch of Vagrant/VirtualBox VMs on one NUC.

Automate the Pi Dramble website I run in my basement with Drupal Pi.

How is latency and stuff? Any slowness that you wouldn't expect from the software that may come from running it on a rpi4? I've been thinking of setting up a few services, but I kinda want to do something like the Pi Dramble, wasn't even aware that a single pi would have the power to run all of these services. Though I'm not actually surprised it does.

A couple years ago when I thought I'd have to get into kubernetes for a living, I built a 4x4GB pi4 cluster with the exact parts list from Jeff Geerling's "dramble" setup (link) and did a bunch of experimentation with k3s as a lightweight cluster solution. Worked pretty amazingly for things like "spin me up 10 more of those things" and for moving things around to upgrade the SD card on the 3rd pi while keeping the services running on the other pi. But I don't need to do kubernetes for a living so the cluster is just sitting here collecting dust powered-down basically.

I see this kind of question asked a lot when people are posting their Kubernetes Pi clusters. The rpi 4 quad core with 4-8GB RAM gives a lot of potential for the price in a kuberenetes setup I feel. I found the pi dramble project interesting, and even more the turing pi using rpi compute modules. Are NUCs really a cheaper alternative for a kubernetes cluster, every time I start try to come up with something I end up with a far more expensive setup and fewer cores. Any hints on viable setups, e.g. replacing 4x POE powered RPI 4's.?

My setup is exactly the same as the top photo on https://www.pidramble.com just with the stack'o'pi zip-tied to the switch so I can move it around without the things sliding around.

If you want an example of this in action, I made an example that does what you are describing.

If you want custom feedback of job status, I have employed this method before. It's a little cumbersome for everyday use, but for big or important jobs it's one way to get a custom report of task output and host failures. Or if you're feeling extra, you can do the full version.

For RHEL servers, we use reposync to mirror patches locally, and then install them with yum. We drive the process with a series of Ansible playbooks. We have some optional host vars or group vars we can declare to tune the patching behavior per-host, or to handle custom patching scenarios. Our patching process generates a report similar to this one.

I uploaded a stripped-down version of it here, if you need ideas. More details and examples here.

I made something similar a while back to report on patch activity; try this example for some ideas.

To generate a patch report, one option is to use a jinja template to compile an HTML-formatted email. For a working example to play with, see this github.

You can generate a "pretty" HTML report using a Jinja template. This github example may be a little overkill for your needs, but it shows how you can assemble a report with per-host facts and task status using Jinja templates.

As you mentioned, using Jinja to generate HTML for job reports. When renovating our script-based patching process for Linux, we had to choose between Redhat Satellite and rolling our own. We found that Satellite was overkill for our needs, and not worth the maintenance fuss and licensing costs. The biggest draw of Satellite for management was reporting... so I tortured Jinja into making a pretty CSS-styled report at the end of our patching playbook. Everyone is happy, and we have one less tool to maintain!

For our patch reporting, we run the yum check-update command and put the output in an HTML template that is emailed to groups. The report we assemble is similar to this.