Use service_facts module to show the current version of the cron process?

Question

I am learning Ansible from this book and it contains this lab:

Write a playbook according to the following specifications:

The cron module must be used to restart your managed servers at 2 a.m. each weekday

After rebooting a message must be written to syslog with the text "CRON initiated reboot completed"

The default systemd target must be set to multi-target

The last task should use service facts to show the current version of the cron process

The last point is a bit confusing. The service_facts module only retrieves facts relating to the name,source,state and status of crond but not the version. How can this objective be achieved?

Please note that, out of the context of a pure learning exercise, rebooting a server every weekday at 2 a.m. using cron looks like a very bad idea. — Zeitounator, Jan 29 '22 at 14:45

Vladimir Botka · Accepted Answer · 2022-01-29T05:40:27.273

This might be a mistake. The request looks suspicious (or ambiguous at least): 'use service facts to show the current version of the cron process'. There is no version among the attributes of the service facts, e.g. (running on Ubuntu)

    - service_facts:
    - debug:
        var: ansible_facts.services['cron.service']

gives

  ansible_facts.services['cron.service']:
    name: cron.service
    source: systemd
    state: running
    status: enabled

Moreover, 'version of process' looks weird. Perhaps they want 'PID of process'? In this case, use systemd, e.g.

    - systemd:
        name: "{{ ansible_facts.services['cron.service']['name'] }}"
      register: result
    - debug:
        var: result.status.ExecMainPID

gives

  result.status.ExecMainPID: '884'

^{(See also: shell> systemctl status cron.service)}

The next option might be that they want 'version of cron binary'. In this case, use package_facts, e.g.

    - package_facts:
    - debug:
        var: ansible_facts.packages.cron.0.version

gives

  ansible_facts.packages.cron.0.version: 3.0pl1-136ubuntu1

See more sophisticated options in How to get which version of cron daemon is running. They might be automated in Ansible as well.

thanks, and yes I think its a mistake. The chapter for this exercise covers the systemd module so I presume it's that — jstar100x, Jan 29 '22 at 23:03

Use service_facts module to show the current version of the cron process?

1 Answers1