Installing IPFIXcol using Ansible

If you are familiar with Ansible, you can use it to easily install IPFIXcol on any target machine. Provided playbook allows you to separately install:

• dependencies for IPFIXcol
• IPFIXcol base
• any IPFIXcol plugin (requires base first)
• IPFIXcol tools (e.g. fbitdump)

The Ansible orchestration was tested on following systems:

• Debian Jessie (8.5)
• Debian Stretch (9.1)
• Ubuntu Trusty Tahr (14.04 LTS)
• Ubuntu Xenial (16.04 LTS)
• CentOS 7 (7.2.1511)
• Fedora 24

If you want to orchestrate latest Fedora systems, make sure your Ansible version contains the dnf module (versions >= 1.9.4). Tested version is 2.1.0.

Howto use IPFIXcol playbook

Installing IPFIXcol with Ansible is fairly simple. First, put target machines into the hosts file. The default target is localhost.

[ipfixcol-hosts]
localhost

To install the entire collector including all (exceptions apply) plugins and tools, use

ansible-playbook -i hosts ipfixcol.yml

To see what this command would do, use --check switch with ansible-playbook

If you want only dependencies for basic IPFIXcol without plugins, use

ansible-playbook -i hosts ipfixcol.yml --tags dependencies

There is a tag for each plugin and its dependency. LibFastbit library can be installed separately as well.

LibFastbit compilation

The LibFastbit is a fairly large beast and takes some time to compile. Therefore, we usually install it using binaries, which are pre-compiled for all supported systems (see above). However, if you are installing on unsupported an distribution or you just want to build from sources, you can force this by using --extra-vars "build_fastbit_compile=true"

Building RPM packages

This is an experimental feature used by maintainers. You have been warned.

On systems which support building of RPM packages, using --extra-vars "build_rpms=true" forces the playbook to try to build RPM packages for all plugins and tools. It was tested only on Centos 7 and will certainly fail for all non-RPM distributions.