Problem
Scenario:
You have recently graduated College and is hired as an IT System Admin in the Information Technology department at a small Start-Up company called Designs4you. Designs4you is a company that specializes in all interior and exterior design ideas and brings people visions to life. This company has been operating for a year now and has 8 employees in total, with two in the IT department; you and your manager.
As a recent graduate with experience in automation and configuring servers, you quickly realize that Design4you has many manual and tedious processes. For example, if the company needs to update their servers, they hire a third-party company to come in physically and perform updates of the servers at 2:00 am on Saturday to avoid downtime. In fact, the reason you were hired is so you can perform these activities instead of the Manager or the 3rd party company that was hired.
After Day 1 on the job and having gone through your job duties with your Manager, you are shocked with all of the manual work that is required for you to do. Your manager also informed you that you need to come into the office everyday as the servers are on-premises in case they need troubleshooting. Throughout your experience at your college, you have learned that there are smarter ways of working and not everything requires you to be present in the office. You have adopted to a new norm of remote working and believe many of your responsibilities can be done remotely.
Task:
Your task is to go through your job duties below and provide an alternative way to accomplish your job using automation and python. More importantly, you want to participate in the new norm of remote working in society and prove to your Manager that most of your tasks can be done remotely.
Requirements:
A. Use your New Work laptop your company provided (Local VM)
a. You must have a linux distro installed (CentOS preferred)
B. Seneca College VPN
C. Design4you Linux Server (Seneca College Linux VM provided to you)
Tasks:
Task I:
As mentioned in the scenario above, one of your task is to update servers at 2:00 AM on a Saturday. In order to avoid a disruptive weekend, you decide to automate this task and avoid coming into the office on the weekend. Using Fabric or Ansible, a script is to be made (fab file or ansible playbook) that will automatically update your servers remotely at 2:00 am.
Task II:
Your manager is looking for all the processes running on your laptop. He needs you to export the processes into a report so he can send to his manager. Using psutil and python, find all the processes running on your laptop and export it into a file. You must use file operations in python to complete this task as well
Task: III:
Your manager is looking to update one of your servers (Seneca College VM) to the latest and greatest technology. He requires information on the disk size and usage of your server as well as the virtual memory available. Using psutil, please get these stats for your manager. At the end of your script, in order to identify which server he needs to update, please specify the IP address for your manager. Use the below functions:
i. disk_usage('/')
ii. virtual_memory()
iii. net_if_addrs()
Task IV:
Your Manager has informed you that they have hired 8 new employees and wants you to create new user accounts and passwords immediately. Using Fabric or Ansible, generate a script (fab file or ansible playbook) that will make 8 new user accounts on your remote server.
Task V:
A legacy application your company uses for their payroll does not work. You realize it requires Python2 in order to work. There are many servers that you are required to install Python2 on. It is also month end and the company requires this software asap. Using any tool of your choice in class, build script that will install python2.