Yea, we were only allowed the tools on the ISO of one specific distribution even for the workstations! It was a secure closed network for testing stuff. My scripts were probably just a worse ansible. Occasionally I would threaten the servers aloud that I would “beat them with a stick” if they misbehaved, because I had a special USB stick which I would use to boot a mini distro that would format the server and pull the approved install image down and setup the network and stuff. It was easier to do that when something hung than diagnose it.