I am starting with a fresh install of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (RHEL8) as a VMware Fusion virtual machine (vm) on my MacBook Pro. I also have an ESXi 7.0 virtual machine to connect to.
I have set up a few resources on the virtual machine that I find helpful. The very first is updating the virtual machine until there are no more updates. I also installed Visual Studio Code.
The first thing I did was create an Ansible user name to run Ansible on the Red Hat vm. This is going to be my control computer.
The allowed characters to create a user account in RHEL8 are:
- ‘a’ … ‘z’
- ‘A’ … ‘Z’
- ‘0’ … ‘9’
- ‘.’ (Period)
- ‘-‘ (hyphen)
- ‘_’ (underscore)
Ref: https://access.redhat.com/solutions/30164 (requires an account to access)
The next thing to do is create an account on an ESXi host that Ansible will use to connect to. The root account will not be able to log on since the SSH daemon is configured with PermitRootLogin set to no. You can verify this by viewing the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file.
The allowed characters for a user account for ESXi 7 are not documented, officially, that I could find. When I logged on and tried to a create a user named svc.ansible, I was provided a warning message that only alpha-numeric characters are allowed. Apparently a user name consisting of a hyphen works, though. So I can use svc-ansible, but not svc.ansible.
If you are like me and like things neat and consistent, you won’t want an account on RHEL8 formatted differently than on ESXi.
svc.ansible and svc-ansible
I will have to decide on a format that allows me consistency across systems.