[PLANE-6] Support for dynamic inventories

[janhalen]

Reported by @agnetemoos:

To be able to support different infrastructures without fixed IP schemes, dynamic inventories needs to be supported.

[janhalen]

The solution should be loosly coupled and standardized whenever possible.

The recommendation is to use standard maintained dynamic inventory plugins from the ansible catalogue:

• https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/index_inventory.html

If there is a specific infratructure that cannot be supported by the standard plugins, it is not complicated to develop a custom script:

• https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/creating-custom-dynamic-inventories-ansible
• https://jacobsalmela.com/2019/07/27/how-to-create-a-custom-dynamic-inventory-script-for-ansible/

The recommendation is though that the script is kept open source, shared and preferably contributed back to the ansible open source community with a maintainer, to ease and open up the code maintenance tasks.

[agnetemoos]

I think solving this issue is critical for the adoption of this system. The inventory plugins listed requires the user to be very close to the central IT-department. Many of OS2BorgerPC users are not.
If spinning up a new PC requires you to open a support ticket to central IT department this system can not replace OS2BorgerPC.

[janhalen]

Please discuss: Could syslogs pushed by promtail on the clients be a robust data-set for at conversion to ansible inventories?