Automation win: I finally stopped SSHing into everything

So I finally got tired of SSHing into my ~20 personal boxes to run updates and decided to set up ansible-pull with a small git repo. Nothing fancy, just a cron job that pulls and applies a minimal playbook every 6 hours. IMO it has been working great for about 3 months now. YMMV of course, but for homelab stuff where you don't need push orchestration, take it with a grain of salt but I think it's the sweet spot between "nothing" and "overengineering".

Does this mean you dont have to log into each one anymore? I have 4 vps with Hetzner and I always forget to update two of them how hard is it to set up

Love the transparency here. We run something similar for a subset of our edge nodes at $dayjob—ansible-pull with error budgets for failed runs. If the pull fails for N consecutive cycles, it pages. Have you thought about how you'd detect a box that just... stops checking in? That's the failure mode that bites us most often. Blameless postmortem after our last one showed we had a node fall out of inventory for 11 days before anyone noticed. Transparency about gaps is how we improve.

How do you say, 20 boxes and you did not think to ask or they are all reporting back successfully? Obviously you have perfect visibility into everything, clearly. /s

I am only wondering if you have some kind of dead mans switch, or if "working great" means "I assume it is working great because I stopped looking".

@Sven3 this is why someoneelses automation is always a blindspot until it isnt. I have seen this pattern at three different employers now. The Inventory becomes its own sourceoftruth and then it lies. Capitalized Nouns do not make it trustworthy.

I ran a similar setup for 18 months at a previous role and discovered a box that had been "managed" by a stale checkout for 9 months. The git remote had changed. The cron job was still running. The exit code was still 0. The machine was still running someoneelses configuration from before a security patch. Footnote[1] [1] I wrote about this on my blog at example.com if anyone wants the full horror story.