Cisco.ios.ios_config module reporting odd local path error

Get Help
, , ,
1

I have a weird issue that I have been on 3-4 forums so far and no one (so far) has any idea what could be the issue.

I have an existing playbook that suddenly seems to be having an odd problem out of the blue. It was working just last week.

I have a series of API calls from our password manager to gather some data, then a play to set some facts related to those fields, and then this play that is failing:

- name: Backup configuration from switch stacks....
  cisco.ios.ios_config:
    backup: true
    backup_options:
      filename: "{{  file_string  }}.txt"
      dir_path: "/home/user_account/backups/{{  inventory_hostname  }}"

The traceback is very non-specific, and occurs with a single host or multiple. Other playbooks running different modules are unaffected and I have removed and redownloaded the cisco.ios collection.

fatal: [hostname]: FAILED! => changed=false
msg: socket path /home/user_account/.ansible/pc/e1b79382e1 does not exist or cannot be found. See Troubleshooting socket path issues in the Network Debug and Troubleshooting Guide

I have read this guide it mentions and have enabled the network verbose logging, and there is nothing obvious or anything pointing in a direction to troubleshoot from.

I have seen a couple suggestions to downgrade Ansible to 2.14 where similar issues don’t happen, but that forum was very non-specific on why. Then another suggestion to try LibSSH over Paramiko, but I have had other issues with LibSSH before on Cisco playbooks.

I am currently running Ansible core 2.17.0, with Python 3.10.12, on Ubuntu 22.04.

1 Like
2

If you’re using Ansible navigator you might verify that your running that task on localhost and its not searching for the path within an EE container.

3

The catch is this playbook was working at one point. For months.

I am thinking its either update related, or something got corrupted. But I am not finding any direction to troubleshoot which is the issue.

4

I have seen this issue occur on long-running tasks. Ansible creates a control socket on the control node to maintain active SSH sessions for a period of time to reduce the performance overhead of having to frequently authenticate with remote hosts between commands sent over ssh. The default value is ControlPersist=60s, so one minute before the socket expires due to inactivity.

The solution in my case was to increase the control persist value to 600s.

ansible.cfg

[ssh_connection]
ssh_args = -C -o ControlMaster=auto -o ControlPersist=600s -o ControlPath=%d/.ansible/ssh/%r@%h

I use OpenSSH though, not LibSSH or paramiko, and I don’t manage network devices, so your mileage may vary.

1 Like