Hey folks. Ansible looks interesting, but I'm having a few issues with it. Apologies if these are covered in a document and I've missed them, I've been trying to read everything.
1. Is it possible to not specify hosts in playbooks, and include them on the ansible-playbook command line? Much of the logic I'm putting into playbooks can be carried out on any number of hosts, both old and new. I don't want to specify all hosts, because I don't necessarily want to run the play on each and every host each and every time it runs. But I don't necessarily want to edit 10-20 playbooks and include a new host if I'm given a new one to administer where the same logic would run, nor do I want to maintain a complicated grouping mechanism. It'd be nice if I could exclude hosts and do something like:
ansible-playbook <playbook> [hostspec]
and not fear that forgetting the hostspec would run the play everywhere by default.
2. Is there any way to specify that all command invocations should assume -K? Every system I administer requires a sudo password, and while -K isn't complicated to include, it must be added to every single invocation of every single command line. It'd be nice to have that as a flag somehow, and to default it to yes in my .ansible.cfg.
3. I ran into issues right away with the ping module. It works fine if ,my remote shell is set to Bash, or presumably to any number of Posix-like shells, but fails miserably if I use my default user shell of Fish. Here's what happens if I run the ping module by default with Fish as my shell:
<thewordnerd.info> ESTABLISH CONNECTION FOR USER: nolan on PORT 22 TO thewordnerd.info
<thewordnerd.info> EXEC "$SHELL" -c 'mkdir -p $HOME/.ansible/tmp/ansible-1351176608.04-152697650487296 && chmod a+rx $HOME/.ansible/tmp/ansible-1351176608.04-152697650487296 && echo $HOME/.ansible/tmp/ansible-1351176608.04-152697650487296'
<thewordnerd.info> REMOTE_MODULE ping
<thewordnerd.info> PUT /tmp/tmp81RNo_ TO ^/ping
thewordnerd.info | FAILED => failed to transfer file to ^/ping
If I change my remote shell to Bash, everything works. Other modules fail if I don't have Bash as my default shell. The fact that something as simple as the ping module failed with such a cryptic error was rather discouraging, and I'm wondering if the ping/fact collection modules require that bash or /bin/sh be their shell, that they should run that by default. I probably won't continue using Ansible if it won't let me have whatever default shell I want on my remote system.
Either way, thanks for a cool system.
