Ansible hangs when calling a script that runs commands over ssh

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1

Hi all,

I have a script on a remote machine that ssh’s into other machines to do stuff.

On the control machine, if I use the command or shell module to execute the script, everything works fine if the script is as simple as:

#!/bin/sh

echo “hi”

When the playbook is run, I get “hi” in stdout as expected.

However, when I change the script to:

#!/bin/sh

ssh somehost “echo hi”

Ansible hangs indefinitely. If I put things in the background, e.g. nohup ssh somehost “echo hi” &, I get no output period.

I’ve tried all sorts of redirecting stdin/stdout, etc and cannot seem to get this to work.

Has anyone run across this? Your help is much appreciated.

Thanks

2

Hi,

Are you sure you have key-based ssh setup correctly on the remote machine? Can ansible user find and access the ssh key required? Are you using the right user on the remote machine to ssh to the other machine? Is the public SSH key of the other machine already in know hosts (or are you ignoring those keys)?

kind regards
Pshem

3

Yes, I am positive. From the control machine, I am able to do ssh “test.sh” with the expected result of hi.

For some reason, when ansible calls a shell script that executes remote ssh commands, the script is not returning.

4

The only thing left in those circumstances is to debug ansible:

  1. Run with ANSIBLE_KEEP_REMOTE_FILES=1 environmental variable
  2. SSH to the remote host and look in ~/.ansible/tmp - you’ll find the actual python script that runs the module there.
  3. Inside that script there’s command to ‘explode’ the script into multiple files.
  4. Once extracted - try to run it manually and see what happens.
  5. Dive into code and see if you can figure out what’s happening there.

Details are here: http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/dev_guide/developing_modules_best_practices.html

kind regards
Pshem