I have worked a lot with AD during the past years mostly with powershell. This time I needed to create a AD computer object with terraform and started to look into how to setup terraform AD provider.

First you need to configure the provider. I am running terraform on my non domain joined laptop. Terraform needs winrm access to a domain joined server with Active directory powershell modules installed. It’s important to use capital letters in all FQDNs for kerberos to work both in provider.tf and krb5.conf.

provider.tf

provider "ad" {
  winrm_hostname         = "SERVER.HOMELAB.DOMAIN.COM"
  winrm_username         = var.aduser
  winrm_password         = var.adpassword
  winrm_port             = 5986
  winrm_proto            = "https"
  winrm_pass_credentials = true
  krb_realm              = "HOMELAB.DOMAIN.COM"
  krb_conf               = "krb5.conf"
  krb_spn                = "SERVER"
  winrm_insecure         = true
}

We also need to create krb5.conf in order to set up kerberos authentication

[libdefaults]
   default_realm = HOMELAB.DOMAIN.COM
   dns_lookup_realm = false
   dns_lookup_kdc = false


[realms]
    HOMELAB.DOMAIN.COM = {
        kdc     =   DC01.HOMELAB.DOMAIN.COM
        admin_server = DC01.HOMELAB.DOMAIN.COM
        default_domain = HOMELAB.DOMAIN.COM
        master_kdc = DC01.HOMELAB.DOMAIN.COM
    }

[domain_realm]
    .kerberos.server = HOMELAB.DOMAIN.COM
    .homelab.domain.com = HOMELAB.DOMAIN.COM
    homelab.domain.com = HOMELAB.DOMAIN.COM

Now the provider should be configured and ready to use. Next step is to create a AD computer object in main.tf.

resource "ad_computer" "c" {
  name        = "test01"
  container   = "OU=Servers,OU=Stockholm,OU=SWE,DC=homelab,DC=domain,DC=com"
  description = "My TF AD object"
}

To test the code run terraform apply -var aduser=adadmin -var adpassword=secretpw123
and wait for output.and type yes if everything seems fine.

Now we have a new computer object in AD managed with terraform.

Next thing I wanted to test was a bit more complex. I wanted to create a OU structure with several sub OUs for each office. In powershell you can solve it with a nested foreach loop.

$sites = ("Malmo", "Ystad", "Karlstad")
$subOU = ("Servers","Computers","Groups","Users")

foreach ($site in $sites){
    New-ADOrganizationalUnit -Name $site -Description "My office in $($site)" -Path "OU=SWE,DC=homelab,DC=domain,DC=com"
    foreach ($ou in $subOU){
        New-ADOrganizationalUnit -Name $ou -Description "OU for $($ou)" -Path "OU=$($site),OU=SWE,DC=homelab,DC=domain,DC=com"
    }
}

In terraform we need to create two variables as lists. One containing each office and one with our sub OUs. We also use locals to combine them with the setproduct function.

variable "sites" {
  type = list
  default = ["Malmo", "Ystad", "Karlstad"]
}

variable "siteOUs" {
  type = list
  default = ["Servers", "Users", "Groups", "Computers"]
}

locals {
  ous = setproduct(var.sites, var.siteOUs)
}

In order to get this to work we first need to create all Office OUs with for_each and our variable sites. For all sub OUs we use our locals named ous as a source and loops trough all combinations that we created with setproduct. We pick the name from the second array and a part of the path from the first array containing office names. Note that we make sure all office OUs are created first with depends_on.

resource "ad_ou" "ou" { 
  for_each = toset(var.sites)
    name = each.value
    path = "OU=SWE,DC=homelab,DC=domain,DC=com"
    description = "OU for ${each.value} Office"
    protected = false
}

resource "ad_ou" "o" {
  for_each = {
    for o in local.ous : "${o[0]}-${o[1]}" => {
      name = o[1]
      path = "OU=${o[0]},OU=SWE,DC=homelab,DC=domain,DC=com"
      description = "OU for ${o[1]} in ${o[0]} Office"
    }

  }
  name        = each.value.name
  path        = each.value.path
  description = each.value.description
  protected   = false

    depends_on = [
    ad_ou.ou
  ]
}

This is the final result i AD console. I learned a lot while figure out how to solve this in terraform.

A runbook can help you to run scripts on a schedule or trigger them with a webhook. You can either run them in Azure or on your on-premises server. This example will show how to run a script on a on-premises that is connected to Azure Arc.


First step is to create an automation account in your favorite region. You might need to create a resource group as well.

Go to your newly created automation account and look for Hybrid worker groups.

Create a new hybrid worker group and select a name.

Now we have a Hybrid worker group without any hybrid workers. Click hybrid workers to the left


Click add


Select one or more servers and add them to your hybrid worker group. If your list is empty you need to enable Azure Arc at least on one server.



Back to automation account and press Runbooks.


Create a new runbook


Give the runbook a name and select type. In this example Powershell och runtime version 5.1.

Now to the fun part, edit the new runbook and write or paste your script. Select publish when done.


When pressing start a meny to the right enables you to select to start the runbook and let it run on a server in your hybrid worker group.


When the runbook is finished we can view the output or errors. The last line shows the name of the server the script was executed on. Can be useful for troubleshooting if the hybrid worker group contains multiple servers.

To make more use of this capability ro trigger script on a local server from Azure start explore schedules and webhooks.

I needed to get a list of people in som AD group for an audit so I wrote a quick script to export each group matching my filter to a CSV-file and populate it with name and samaccountname. Setting semi colon as an delimiter ensures that you can open the CSV-file in Excel with no additional work to get columns correct.

$groups = Get-ADGroup -filter { name -like "Company-Fileserver-ACL*" }

foreach ($group in $groups)
{
	Write-Output $group.name
	$file=$group.name + ".csv"
	Get-ADGroupMember $group.name | Select-Object name, samaccountname | Export-Csv -path $file -NoTypeInformation -delimiter ";"
}

New to AWX and I had a goal to setup Vcenter as an inventory source with groups based on vmware tags. I got that setup working with ansible and started to investigate how to achieve same result in AWX. After a couple of days testing I got some hints on Reddit and was able to get it working as expected. Hopefully this guide can help someone (and me next time) setup inventory with tags.

First step if not already done is to install AWX. I will not cover the setup. It is already covered here https://github.com/ansible/awx/blob/devel/INSTALL.md. I have chosen to install on a standalone Docker host in my Home lab running CentOS.


Open the inventory file install/inventory in your favorite editor.
Look for and uncomment custom_venv_dir=/opt/my-envs/

Create dir: mkdir /opt/my-envs

Run the playbook: ansible-playbook install.yml -i inventory

Create folder and Python env and install all prerequisites

mkdir /opt/my-envs/vm-tags
python3 -m venv /opt/my-envs/vm-tags/
source /opt/my-envs/vm-tags/bin/activate
yum install gcc
yum install python36-devel
pip3 install psutil
pip3 install ansible
pip3 install pyaml
pip3 install requests
pip3 install PyVmomi
pip3 install --upgrade pip setuptools
pip3 install --upgrade git+https://github.com/vmware/vsphere-automation-sdk-python.git
deactivate

Log on to AWX and navigate to Settings -> System.
Add /opt/my-envs/vm-tags to CUSTOM VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT PATHS

Last step in this part is to verify our new custom env. Go to ORGANIZATIONS and push then pencil to edit default organization.

Verify that you can see your new Ansible Environment.