About rhel_system_roles on the EX294 v9 exam

[morbius]

I know how sensitive everyone is about possibly violating the exam NDA, but I'm going to try my luck to get the answer on this issue that's been bugging me.

Are we on the EX294 v9 exam going to be provided with redhat.rhel_system_roles collection in a tarball, just like in the excercizes in the RH294 course? It makes perfect sense that on the exam you should be examined on the things that you've been trained on. Installing this collection from a rpm in RH repos would mean that you can't use it with ansible-navigator, which is the tool that v9 exam is built around.

I also assume that the v9 exam storage tasks will be meant for using redhat.rhel_system_roles.storage role?

[Wasim_Raja]

@morbius If you install a collection from an RPM package, you can still use it with Ansible-navigator by specifying the path to the collection in the collections_path

something like below:

collections_path = /usr/share/ansible/collections:/path/to/my/collections

You can refer the below link for detailed documentation on collections.

https://docs.ansible.com/collections.html

[morbius]

I'm 100% percent sure that in RH294 course it stated that if you install rhel_system_roles from the repo, you won't be able to use it together with ansible-navigator and will have to rely on ansible-playbook and the rest of the tools used in v8. But now that I'm searching through the material, I can't find that statement any more, it was removed.There is also a problem with installing this collection and several others using ansible-galaxy, as RH support stated "because we avoid direct interaction with the community Ansible Galaxy service".

I will make some tests tonight to see what actualy works now.

[morbius]

Ok, so I checked the situation and in RH124 material there is still a tiny remnant of previous warning that you can't use rhel_system_roles from the repo with ansible-navigator. It says:

You can use the ansible-playbook command to run a playbook that uses system roles in Red Hat Enterprise Linux when you do not have Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform or ansible-navigator`.

This is because hosts in the lab have on them version 1.16.2-1 of the rhel_system_roles package, which apparently doesn't work with ansible-navigator, when you check the collections from ansible-navigator, you won't find rhel_system_roles among them. To go around this, RH has in the excercizes provided redhat-rhel_system_roles-1.19.3 as a tarball for student to install, which works with ansible-navigator.

So, the lab environment is a mess. My problem is that I now don't know what to expect on the examination environment. rhel_system_roles is a very important collection that's used in a lot of potential exam tasks.

[Chetan_Tiwary_]

@bonnevil FYI - Please share your valuable inputs here. 

[bonnevil · Accepted solution]

I cannot respond about anything regarding the exam, and I'm not on the certification team in any case.

If there's a general ansible-navigator question about how to get an Ansible Content Collection into an execution environment, remember that your project directory is accessible by the playbook from inside the EE. 

In the directory containing your playbook, the host and group variable files and any roles and collections in the roles/ and collections/ subdirectories of the directory are also visible inside the execution environment.  You could use `ansible-galaxy collections` to download those collections into the correct location in advance of running your playbook, possibly with the help of a requirements.yml file if you wanted.

If you're messing with the rhel-system-roles RPM package, it's probably dropping roles and collections into some place like /usr/share/ansible/roles on the system, and you could simply copy them into place if you wanted a local copy for that Ansible project (maybe because you wanted to fix the version in place, but I'd have to look at precedence of collection_path to see what wins).  That's a bit hackish, but it's an option.

Also remember that the ansible-galaxy command doesn't have to get its content from the Ansible Galaxy service, it can also be used to work with local collections and roles in tar archives, at various URLs, and so on.

[Chetan_Tiwary_]

Thanks much @bonnevil !

[morbius]

That's all nice, but it would be a load off my mind if I knew that on the exam ansible-galaxy command will be able to install rhel_system_roles collection properly, because in the lab it can't.