The end of the year is a perfect time to look back on some of the Magazine’s most popular articles of 2019. One of the Fedora operating systems’s many strong points is its wide array of tools for system administrators. As your skills progress, you’ll find that the Fedora OS has even more to offer. And because Linux is the sysadmin’s best friend, you’ll always be in good company. In 2019, there were quite a few articles about sysadmin tools our readers enjoyed. Here’s a sampling.
Introducing Fedora CoreOS
If you follow modern IT topics, you know that containers are a hot topic — and containers mean Linux. This summer brought the first preview release of Fedora CoreOS. This new edition of Fedora can run containerized workloads. You can use it to deploy apps and services in a modern way.
To be a good sysadmin, you need to understand system startup and the boot process. From time to time, you’ll encounter software errors, configuration problems, or other issues that keep your system from starting normally. With the information in the article below, you can do some life-saving surgery on your system, and restore it to working order.
Although this article was published a few years ago, it continues to be one of the most popular. Apparently, we’re not the only people who sometimes get locked out of our own system! If this happens to you, and you need to reset the root password, the article below should do the trick.
This article is part of an entire series on systemd, the modern system and process manager in Fedora and other distributions. As you may know, systemd has sophisticated but easy to use methods to start up or shut own services in the right order. This article shows you how they work. That way you can apply the right options to unit files you create for systemd.
Fedora 30 introduced new ways to change the boot options for your kernel. This article from Laura Abbott on the Fedora kernel team explains the new Bootloader Spec (BLS). It also tells you how to use it to set options on your kernel for boot time.
Stay tuned to the Magazine for other upcoming “Best of 2019” categories. All of us at the Magazine hope you have a great end of year and holiday season.
Search is a central concept in the GNOME user experience. It provides quick navigation and shortcuts to recently used documents, places and software.
A search provider is used by an application to expose such data to the users via the GNOME Shell search screen. As for Web browsers currently only Gnome Web (Epiphany) have integrated this feature.
This long awaited feature finally arrives with the latest Firefox update in Fedora. Although there’s an upstream effort to ship it in Mozilla official builds, Mozilla builds are missing a generic way to install the GNOME Shell integration system. This explain why this specific feature has to be shipped by particular distributions.
Firefox search provider is launched when an active Firefox instance is running. It gets live data from user profile. An offline search provider was also considered but it’s not yet implemented right due to SQL database locks at Firefox profiles.
To get web search results on top of your search you may also need to activate Firefox in the search configuration. To do so go to Settings -> Search, find Firefox and move it on top of the list.
Now you can use the Gnome search facility to search the web.
When you manage a Linux instance, you’ll find that your job is made much easier by the many tools designed specifically to deal with something specific within the system. For example, if you need to install packages, you have easy-to-use package managers that make that a breeze. If you need to create, resize or delete filesystems, you can do so using tools that are built to be used by humans. The same goes for managing services and browsing logs with systemd using the systemctl and journalctl commands respectively. The screen tool is another such example.
You can run all of those tools directly at the command line interface. But if you’re connecting to a server remotely using SSH, sometimes you need another layer between you and the operating system so the command you’re running doesn’t stop if your remote connection terminates. Sysadmins do this to prevent sudden termination in case of a connection issue, but also on purpose to run a command that needs to keep running indefinitely in the background. Enter the screen utility.
Introducing screen
The screen tool allows you to have multiple sessions (called screens) that are independent from each other and that you can name, leave and join as you desire. It’s multi-tasking for the remote CLI. You can get started with it simply by running this command:
$ screen
The command creates a screen and connect you to it: your current session is now a screen. You can run any command that does something and doesn’t automatically terminate after a few seconds. For example, you might call a web app executable or a game server. Then press Ctrl+A and, right after that, the D key and you will detach from the screen, leaving it running in the background.
The Ctrl+A combination, given that it is part of every screen command, is often shortened in documentation to C-a. Then the detach command used earlier can be described simply as C-a d.
Getting in and out of sessions
If you want to connect to that screen again, run screen -r and you will attach to that screen. Just running screen will create a new screen, and subsequent screen -r commands will print out something like this:
There are several suitable screens on: 5589.pts-0.hostname (Detached) 5536.pts-0.hostname (Detached) Type "screen [-d] -r [pid.]tty.host" to resume one of them.
You can then choose whether to resume the first or the second screen you created by running either one of these commands:
$ screen -r 5536
$ screen -r 5589
Adding the rest of the name of the string is optional in this case.
Named screens
If you know you’ll have multiple screens, you might want to be able to connect to a screen using a name you choose. This is easier than choosing from a list of numbers that only reflect the process IDs of the screen sessions. To do that, use the -S option as in the following example:
$ screen -S mywebapp
Then you can resume that screen in the future using this command:
$ screen -r mywebapp
Starting a process in the background using screen
An optional argument is the command to be executed inside the created session. For example:
$ screen -S session_name command args
This would be the same as running:
$ screen -S session_name
…And then running this command inside the screen session:
$ command args
The screen session will terminate when the command finishes its execution.
This is made particularly useful by passing the -dm option, which starts the screen in the background without attaching to it. For example, you can copy a very large file in the background by running this command:
Now that you’ve seen the basics, let’s see some of the other most commonly used screen features.
Easily switching between windows in a screen
When inside a screen, you can create a new window using C-a c. After you do that, you can switch between the windows using C-a n to go to the next one and C-a p to go to the previous window. You can destroy (kill) the current window with C-a k.
Copying and pasting text
The screen tool also enables you to copy any text on the screen and paste it later wherever you can type some text.
The C-a [ keybinding frees your cursor of any constraints and lets it go anywhere your will takes it using the arrow keys on your keyboard. To select and copy text, move to the start of the string you want to copy, and press Enter on the keyboard. Then move the cursor to the end of the text you want to copy and press Enter again.
After you’ve done that, use C-a ] to paste that text in your shell. Or you can open a text editor like vim or nano and paste the text you copied there.
Important notes about screen
Here are some other tips to keep in mind when using this utility.
Privileged sessions vs. sudo inside a screen
What if you need to run a command with root privileges inside screen? You can run either of these commands:
Notice that the second command is like running this command:
# screen -S sessionname command
Seeing things this way makes it a lot more obvious coupled with the fact that each screen is associated to a user:
The first one creates a screen with root privileges that can be accessed by the current user even if, within that screen, they switch to another user or root using the sudo -i command.
The second one creates a screen that can only be accessed by the root user, or by running sudo screen -r as a user with the appropriate sudo access.
Notes about screen in systemd units
You might be tempted to run a screen session in the background as part of a systemd unit executed at startup, just like any Unix daemon. That way you can resume the screen session and interact with whatever you ran that way. That can work, but you need to consider that it requires the right setup.
By default, systemd assumes services are either oneshot, meaning they set up something and then shut down, or simple. A service is simple by default when you create a unit file with no Type. What you actually need to do is to set the Type to forking, which describes screen‘s actual behavior when the -dm option is passed. It starts the process and then forks itself, leaving the process running in the background while the foreground process closes.
If you don’t set that, that screen behavior is interpreted by systemd as the service exiting or failing. This causes systemd to kill the background process when the foreground process exits, which is not what you want.
Sometimes during a critical activity, working with overlapping windows becomes counterproductive. You might find a tiled window manager like sway to be a good alternative.
Sway is a tiling Wayland compositor. It has the advantage of compatibility with an existing i3 configuration, so you can use it to replace i3 and use Wayland as the display protocol.
Installing sway
To setup sway, open a new terminal and type the following command
sudo dnf install sway
Once the installation is completed, log out of your user session. At the login screen, select your user account. Before you enter your password, choose Sway from the menu, as shown in the following image.
After login, your desktop looks like this:
Configuration
To begin configuration, copy the default config into your user directory. Do that using the following commands.
Sway is highly configurable. It’s suggested you read the project’s wiki page to fine tune your settings. For example, to change the keyboard layout, open a new terminal and run this command:
Save the settings. To reload the configurations, press Super+Shift+c. (Typically the Super key is mapped to the logo key on a PC.)
Waybar
Sway’s default status bar may not have all the functions you want. Fortunately Waybar is a good replacement. To install, run the follow commands. (Note, however, that COPR is not an official Fedora repository and not supported by the Fedora Project.)
“It’s all 1s and 0s.” People say this when they’re making a joke or a sarcastic remark. When it comes to computers thought, it’s really true. And at the hardware level, that’s all there is. The processor, the memory, various forms of storage, USB, HDMI, and network connections, along with everything else in that cell-phone, tablet, laptop, or desktop only uses 1s and 0s. Bytes provide for the grouping of the 1s and 0s. So they are a big help in keeping them organized. Let’s looks at how they do that.
Bytes are the unit of measure for data and programs stored and used in your computer. Though the byte has existed for a long time in computer history and has taken several forms, it’s current 8 bit length is well settled. Taken either singly or as adjacent groups, bytes are the generally accepted most common way the Bits in a computer are kept organized.
So what’s a bit? A bit is a binary digit; that is it can have only two values. In computers the two values a bit can have are zero (0) and one (1). That’s it, no other choices. A byte is just eight binary bits that are taken together to represent binary numbers. Through various coding schemes the numbers can represent a wide variety of other things like the characters we write with.
The table below shows a single Little-Endian byte showing individual bits of this byte and their associated powers of two. The decimal values of each power of two is show with each bit for reference. The line between Bit 3 and Bit 4 is where the byte is sub divided into four bit groups called Nibbles. Little-Endian is a very commonly used byte format. Stay tuned for more on Endians. If you’re curious about the name, do a search on (etymology of endian).
One Little-Endian Byte:
Bit0
Bit1
Bit2
Bit3
Bit4
Bit5
Bit6
Bit7
Power of 2
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
Decimal value
1
2
4
8
16
32
64
128
Each nibble of a byte can hold a four bit binary number as shown in the following table. If a bit is set to “1” that power of two adds to the value of the nibble. If a bit is set to “0” that power of two does not add to the value of the nibble. A byte which is two nibbles can hold a two digit hexadecimal number. Bits are really all that a computer can use. Programmers and engineers developing computer hardware use hexadecimal to make dealing with the bits easier. In the table below the least significant bit is on the left 20, 21, 22, 23
One Little-Endian Nibble:
Binary Number
Hexidecimal Value
0000
0
1000
1
0100
2
1100
3
0010
4
1010
5
0110
6
1110
7
0001
8
1001
9
0101
A
1101
B
0011
C
1011
D
0111
E
1111
F
I’ll explain Littel-Endian starting with a one byte diagram. The longer lines at the end of this frame are the boundaries of the byte so if you were drawing a group of adjacent bytes it would be clear where one byte left off and another began. The small lines divide the frame into individual locations where each of the eight bits can be shown. The medium line in the middle divides the byte into two equal four bit pieces which are the nibbles. Nibbles also have a long and varied history. I’ve never seen that they have been standardized. However the current well settled view is that nibbles are groups of four bits as I have shown them below. All of these lines only exist as people draw bytes. The lines don’t exist in the computer.
Byte Illustration
The Lower Nibble and Upper Nibble are labels as they would be used in a Little-Endian byte. In Little-Endian, the least significant digit is on the left end of a number. So the Lower Nibble is the least significant half of the number in the byte. Likewise the least significant bit is on the left LSBit (usually noted as LSB) stands for Least Significant Bit. and the most significant bit is on the right. The Upper Nibble on the right is the most significant half of the number. MSBit (usually noted as MSB) is the most significant bit. This is opposite to how we write decimal numbers with the most significant digit on the left. This is called Little-Endian because the “little end” of the number comes first.
With the byte being able to hold two hexadecimal digits, a byte can hold hexadecimal numbers between 00 and FF (0 to 255 in decimal) So if you are using bytes to represent the characters of a human readable language you just give each character, punctuation mark, etc. a number. (Then of course get everyone to agree with the coding you invented.) This is only one use for bytes. Bytes are also used as program code that your computer runs, numbers for various data you might have, and everything else that inhabits a computer in the CPU, memory, storage, or zooming around on the various buses and interface ports.
As it turns out there are two commonly used byte formats. Little-Endian has been used in the prior examples. Its feature is having the least significant digit on the left and the most significant digit on the right. If we were to write the decimal number 1620 in Little-Endian format it would be 0261.
There is also a byte format called Big-Endian. As you might expect it is opposite of Little-Endian with the most significant digit on the left and the least significant digit on the right. Like we write decimal numbers.
There are reasons for using both and the meaty reasons are beyond the scope of this article. However, Little-Endian tends to be used in microprocessors. The x86-64 processors in most PCs use the Little-Endian byte format. Though the later generations do have special instructions that provide limited use of Big-Endian format. The Big-Endian byte format is widely used in networking and notably in those big Z computers. Now you’re not necessarily limited to one or the other. The newer ARM processors can use either Endian format. Devices like microprocessors that can use both Big-Endian and Little Endian are sometimes referred to as Bi-Endian.
Well, sometimes you really need more than one byte to hold a number. To that end there are longer formats available that are composed of multiple bytes. For instance: The x86-64 processors Have Words which are 16 bits or 2 bytes that happen to be lined up next to each other head to tail, so to speak. They also have Double Words (32 bits or 4 bytes), and Quad Words (64 bits or 8 bytes). Now these are just examples of data forms made available by the processor hardware.
Programmers working with languages have many more ways to organize the bits and bytes. When the program is ready, a compiler or another mechanism converts the way that the program has bits and bytes organized into data forms that the CPU hardware can deal with.
Silverblue is an operating system for your desktop built on Fedora. It’s excellent for daily use, development, and container-based workflows. It offers numerous advantages such as being able to roll back in case of any problems. If you want to update to Fedora 31 on your Silverblue system, this article tells you how. It not only shows you what to do, but also how to revert back if anything unforeseen happens.
Prior the the update to Fedora 31 it is better to do any pending upgrades.
Updating using GNOME Software
Unfortunately the update can’t be done in GNOME Software right now, because of a bug in GNOME Software itself. For additional information please look at upstream issue.
Updating using terminal
If you do not like GNOME Software or like to do everything in terminal, than this next guide is for you.
Updating to Fedora 31 using terminal is easy. First, check if the 31 branch is available, which should be true now:
$ ostree remote refs fedora
You should see the following in the output:
fedora:fedora/31/x86_64/silverblue
Next, rebase your system to the Fedora 31 branch.
$ rpm-ostree rebase fedora:fedora/31/x86_64/silverblue
Finally, the last thing to do is restart your computer and boot to Fedora 31.
How to revert things back
If anything bad happens — for instance, if you can’t boot to Fedora 31 at all — it’s easy to go back. Just pick the previous entry in GRUB, and your system will start in its previous state before switching to Fedora 31. To make this change permanent, use the following command:
$ rpm-ostree rollback
That’s it. Now you know how to rebase to Fedora 31 and back. So why not do it today?
The kernel team is working on final integration for kernel 5.4. This version was just recently released, and will arrive soon in Fedora. This version has many security fixes included. As a result, the Fedora kernel and QA teams have organized a test week from Monday, December 09, 2019 through Monday, December 16, 2019. Refer to the wiki page for links to the test images you’ll need to participate. Read below for details.
How does a test week work?
A test day/week is an event where anyone can help make sure changes in Fedora work well in an upcoming release. Fedora community members often participate, and the public is welcome at these events. If you’ve never contributed before, this is a perfect way to get started.
To contribute, you only need to be able to do the following things:
Download test materials, which include some large files
Read and follow directions step by step
The wiki page for the kernel test day has a lot of good information on what and how to test. After you’ve done some testing, you can log your results in the test day web application. If you’re available on or around the day of the event, please do some testing and report your results.
Happy testing, and we hope to see you in the Test Week.
Large files like logs or source code can run into the thousands of lines. That makes navigating them difficult, particularly from the terminal. Additionally, most terminal emulators have a scrollback buffer of only a few hundred lines. That can make it impossible to browse large files in the terminal using utilities which print to standard output like cat, head and tail. In the early days of computing, programmers solved these problems by developing utilities for displaying text in the form of virtual “pages” — utilities imaginatively described as pagers.
Pagers offer a number of features which make text file navigation much simpler, including scrolling, search functions, and the ability to feature as part of a pipeline of commands. In contrast to most text editors, some terminal pagers do not require loading the entire file for viewing, which makes them faster, especially for very large files.
In the modern era of Linux computing, terminal emulators are more sophisticated than ever. They offer support for a kaleidoscope of colors, terminal resizing, as well as a host of other features to make parsing text on screen easier and more efficient. Terminal pagers have undergone a similar evolution, from extremely simple UNIX utilities like pg and more, to sophisticated programs with a wide range of features, covering any number of use cases. With this in mind, we’ve put together a list of some of the most popular terminal paging utilities — more or less.
More
more is one of the earliest pagers, initially featured in version 3.0 BSD. The first implementation of more was written in 1978 by Daniel Halbert. Since then, more has become a ubiquitous feature of many operating systems, including Windows, OS/2, MacOS and most linux distributions.
more is a very lightweight utility. The version featured in util-linux runs to just under 2100 lines of C. However, this small footprint comes at a price. Most versions of more feature relatively limited functionality, with no support for backwards scroll or search. Commands are similarly stripped back: press enter to scroll one line, or space to scroll one page. Some other useful commands include:
Press v while reading to open the current file in your default terminal editor.
‘/pattern‘ let’s you search for the next occurrence of pattern.
:n and :p will open the next and previous files respectively when more is called with more than one file as arguments
Less
less was initially conceived as a successor to more, addressing some of its limitations. Building on the functionality of more, less adds a number of useful features including backwards scroll, backwards search. It is also more amenable to window resizing.
Navigation in less is similar to more, though less borrows a few useful commands from the vi editor as well. Users can navigate the document using the familiar home row navigational keys. A glance at the man page for less reveals a fairly rich repertoire of available commands. Some particularly useful examples include:
?pattern lets you search backwards in the file for pattern
&pattern shows only lines which feature pattern. This is particularly useful for those who find themselves issuing $ grep pattern | less regularly.
Calling less with the -s (–sqeueeze-blank-lines) flag allows you to view text files with large gaps. Multiple newline characters are reduced to single breaks.
s filename, called from within the program, saves input to filename (if input is a pipe).
Alternatively, calling less with the -o filename flag will save the input of less to filename.
With this enhanced functionality comes a little extra weight. The version of less that ships with Fedora at the time of writing clocks in at around 25000 lines of source code. Granted, for all but the most storage constrained systems, this is a non-issue. Besides, less is more than more.
Most
While less aims to expand on the existing capabilities of more, most takes a different approach. Rather than expanding on the traditional single file view, most gives users the ability to split their view into “windows.” Each window contains different files in different viewing modes. Significantly, most takes into account the width of its input text. The default viewing mode doesn’t wrap text (-S in less), a feature particularly useful when dealing with “wide” files. While these design decisions might represent a significant departure from tradition for some users, the end result is very powerful.
In addition to the navigation commands offered by more, most uses intuitive mnemonics for file navigation. For example, t moves to the top of a file, and b moves to the bottom. As a result, users unfamiliar with vi and its descendants will find most to be refreshingly simple.
The distinguishing feature of most is its ability to split windows and contexts quickly and easily. For example, one could open two distinct text files using the following:
$ most textFile1.txt textFile2.txt
In order to split the screen horizontally, use the key combos Ctrl+x, 2 or Ctrl+w, 2. The command :n will open the next file argument in a given window, offering a split screen view of two files:
If you turn wrap off in one window, it does not affect the behavior of other windows. The \ character indicates a wrap or fold, while the $ character indicates that the file extends past the limitations of the current window.
pspg
Those who work with SQL databases often need to be able to examine the contents of our databases at a glance. The command line interfaces for many popular open source DBMS’s, such as MySQL and PostGreSQL, use the system default pager to view outputs that don’t fit on a single screen. Utilities like more and less are designed around the idea of presenting text files, but for more structured data, leave something to be desired. Naive text paginating programs have no concept of broad, tabular data, which can be frustrating when dealing with large queries.
pspg attempts to address this by offering users the ability to freeze columns while viewing, sort data in situ, and colourize output. While pspg was intended initially to serve as a pager replacement for psql specifically, the program also supports the viewing of CSV data, and is a suitable drop-in replacement for mysql and pgcli.
Vim
In a modern, technicolor terminal, the idea of endless pages of drab grey on black text can feel like something of an anachronism. The syntax highlighting options offered by powerful text editors like vim can be useful for browsing source code. Furthermore, the search functions offered by vim vastly outclass the competition. With this in mind, vim ships with a shell script less.sh that lets vim serve as a replacement for conventional pagers.
To set vim as the default pager for man pages, add the following to your shell’s config (such as ~/.bashrc if using the default bash shell):
Alternatively, to set vim as the default pager system-wide, locate the less.sh script. (You can find it at /usr/share/vim/vim81/macros/ on current Fedora systems.) Export this location as the variable PAGER to set it as default, or under an alias to invoke it explicitly.
There are over 40 desktops in Fedora. Each desktop has it’s own strengths and weaknesses. Usually picking a desktop is a very personal preference based on features, looks, and other qualities. Sometimes, what you pick for a desktop is limited by hardware constraints.
This article is to help people compare Fedora desktops based on the desktop baseline memory. To narrow the scope, we are only looking at the desktops that have an official Fedora Live image.
Installation and Setup
Each of the desktops was installed on it’s own KVM virtual machine. Each virtual machine had 1 CPU, 4GB of memory, 15 GB virtio solid state disk, and everything else that comes standard on RHEL 8.0 kvm.
The images for installation were the standard Fedora 31 Live images. For GNOME, that image was the Fedora Workstation. For the other desktops, the corresponding Spin was used. Sugar On A Stick (SOAS) was not tested because it does not install easily onto a local drive.
The virtual machine booted into the Live CD. “Install to Hard Disk” was selected. During the install, only the defaults were used. A root user, and a regular users were created. After installation and reboot, the Live image was verified to not be in the virtual CDROM.
The settings for each desktop was not touched. They each ran whatever settings came default from the Live CD installation. Each desktop was logged into via the regular user. A terminal was opened. Using sudo each machine ran “dnf -y update”. After update, in that sudo terminal, each machine ran “/sbin/shutdown -h now” to shut down.
Testing
Each machine was started up. The desktop was logged into via the regular user. Three of the desktop terminals were opened. xterm was never used, it was always the terminal for that desktop, such as konsole.
In one terminal, top was started and M pressed, showing the processes sorted by memory. In another terminal, a simple while loop showed “free -m” every 30 seconds. The third terminal was idle.
I then waited 5 minutes. This allowed any startup services to finish. I recorded the final free result, as well as the final top three memory consumers from top.
Remember that these numbers are from a default Live install. If you remove, or add services and features, your memory usage will change. But this is a good baseline to look at if you are determining your desktop based on memory consumption.
If you’ve worked with instances in Amazon Web Services (AWS) for a long time, you may run into this common issue. It’s not technical, but more to do with the human nature of getting too comfortable. When you launch a new instance in a region you haven’t used recently, you may end up creating a new SSH key pair. This leads to having too many keys, which can become complicated and disordered.
This article shows you a way to have your public key in all regions. A recent Fedora Magazine article includes one solution. But the solution in this article is automated even further, and in a more concise and scalable way.
Say you have a Fedora 30 or 31 desktop system where your key is stored, and Ansible is installed as well. These two things together provide the solution to this problem and many more.
With Ansible’s ec2_key module, you can create a simple playbook that will maintain your SSH key pair in all regions. If you need to add or remove keys, it’s as simple as adding and removing lines from a file.
Setting up and running the playbook
To use the playbook, first install necessary dependencies for the ec2_key module:
$ sudo dnf install python3-boto python3-boto3
The playbook is simple: you need only to change your key and its name as in the example below. After that, run the playbook and it iterates over all the public AWS regions listed. The example also includes the restricted regions in case you have access. To include them, uncomment each line as needed, save the file, and then run the playbook again.
---
- name: Maintain an ssh key pair in ec2 hosts: localhost connection: local gather_facts: no vars: ansible_python_interpreter: python tasks: - name: Make available your ssh public key in ec2 for new instances ec2_key: name: "YOUR KEY NAME GOES HERE" key_material: 'YOUR KEY GOES HERE' state: present region: "{{ item }}" with_items: - us-east-2 #US East (Ohio) - us-east-1 #US East (N. Virginia) - us-west-1 #US West (N. California) - us-west-2 #US West (Oregon) - ap-east-1 #Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) - ap-south-1 #Asia Pacific (Mumbai) - ap-northeast-2 #Asia Pacific (Seoul) - ap-southeast-1 #Asia Pacific (Singapore) - ap-southeast-2 #Asia Pacific (Sydney) - ap-northeast-1 #Asia Pacific (Tokyo) - ca-central-1 #Canada (Central) - eu-central-1 #EU (Frankfurt) - eu-west-1 #EU (Ireland) - eu-west-2 #EU (London) - eu-west-3 #EU (Paris) - eu-north-1 #EU (Stockholm) - me-south-1 #Middle East (Bahrain) - sa-east-1 #South America (Sao Paulo) # - us-gov-east-1 #AWS GovCloud (US-East) # - us-gov-west-1 #AWS GovCloud (US-West) # - ap-northeast-3 #Asia Pacific (Osaka-Local) # - cn-north-1 #China (Beijing) # - cn-northwest-1 #China (Ningxia)
This playbook requires AWS access via API, as well. To do this, use environment variables as follows:
Another option is to install the aws cli tools and add the credentials as explained in a previous Fedora Magazine article. It is not recommended to insert these values in the playbook if you store it anywhere online! You can find this playbook code on GitHub.
After the playbook finishes, confirm that your key is available on the AWS console. To do that:
Log into your AWS console
Go to EC2 > Key Pairs
You should see your key listed. The only limitation is that you have to check region-by-region with this method.
Another way is to use a quick command in a shell to do this check for you.
First create a variable with all regions on the playbook:
