# Authentication failure error

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/authentication-failure-error/16960>\
**Category:** Ansible Project\
**Created:** [December 4, 2014, 11:27am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/authentication-failure-error/16960 "2014-12-04T11:27:41Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![aditya\_patnaik](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3bc359/32.png) [@aditya\_patnaik](https://forum.ansible.com/u/aditya_patnaik)\
**Post date:** [December 4, 2014, 11:27am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/authentication-failure-error/16960/1 "2014-12-04T11:27:41Z")

</div>

I am new to ansible . I crated this simple playbook to extract the log files of remote server

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![James\_Cammarata](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/7c8e57/32.png) [@James\_Cammarata](https://forum.ansible.com/u/James_Cammarata)\
**Post date:** [December 4, 2014, 5:50pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/authentication-failure-error/16960/2 "2014-12-04T17:50:03Z")

</div>

Hi Aditya,

Are the keys in the default location (for example, ~/.ssh/id\_rsa) or do they have different names? If the keys are not using the default name, you’ll need to add “ansible\_ssh\_private\_key\_file=/path/to/key” for each host. If there is only a single private key file, you can set the option “private\_key\_file=/path/to/key” in your ansible.cfg file.

Please see the following documents for more details:

[http://docs.ansible.com/intro\_configuration.html#private-key-file](http://docs.ansible.com/intro_configuration.html#private-key-file)

[http://docs.ansible.com/intro\_inventory.html#list-of-behavioral-inventory-parameters](http://docs.ansible.com/intro_inventory.html#list-of-behavioral-inventory-parameters)