Fixed missing colon in tasks/main.yml

There was a missing colon in line 7 of tasks/main.yml which was fixed by this release.

Attach overview of hosts in current patch groups to announcement email

Some of my users asked if I can send an overview which hosts are in which patch group along with the email announcing the next patch cycle. This feature is added with this release. Please see the python script get_rhel_patch_groups.py and the commit messages for details on how it's done.

All changes in short

• Attaching an overview of hosts in the different patch phases to the announcement email.
• Using needs-restarting -r on remote hosts to check whether they need to be restarted.
• Using the reboot module to reboot the remote hosts instead of custom tasks.

New feature: Support for more than one RHEL major version

Prior to this version the RHEL patchmanagement role supports advisories for one major release, only. In this version it's possible to create patch sets that contain the advisories for serveral major releases, e. g. RHSA for RHEL 7 and RHEL 8 and future major releases.

New feature: Python script for log parsing

Changelog

This version comes with the python script check_ansible_log.py which adds the functionality to parse the generated log file for unreachable hosts and failed tasks.

It helps to identify issues after a patch phase.

Please note, that you have to adjust the script to your current environment (see comment included in script file).

Introduction of rhel-patch-phases with an example inventory

This release is using ansible groups called rhel-patch-phases instead of stage related groups to determine on which hosts a patch set is to run at the due date.

I have decided to increment the major release number because I'm not entirely sure if previous setups would break after updating to this version.

Changelog

• Using rhel-patch-phases instead of stage groups in this role
• Added hosts.example to show the usage of the new ansible groups
• Improved the README.md

Click here to see full comparison of changes.

Edit: Tag changed to 3.0.0 to fullfil the semantic version requirements for the galaxy import. No additional changes were made.

Variables from create_vars.sh moved to separate file

Changes:

• Add path vars/main.yml to gitignore
• Fixed bug in create_vars.sh and moved variables to seperate file (see afb40e3 for details)
• Added information to README.md on how to use this role

Automatic mail notification and due time calculation

Changes:

• New function send_mail
• Due times are calculated automatically

The due times in mail_text.txt are calculated when you run the script create_vars.sh. Per default the patch cycle starts seven days after the run of create_vars.sh in testing, after 14 days in quality and after 21 days in production. So you don't have to edit create_vars.sh and insert the due times manually anymore.

This version comes with the new function send_mail. You could now specify a mail recipient in create_vars.sh and a mail with the content of the file mail_text.txt would be send to the recipient.

Automated creation of patch sets

The patch set is now created by running the script create_vars.sh. The amount of manually work is reduced significantly.

Manually create patch set

In this version the patch sets in vars/main.yml are created and set manually. See the README.md of this release for further information.