Customizing how 'su' is used?

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1

Hi,

I’ve been learning Ansible and have run into a behavior that causes problems with the server setup here at work. I’m wondering if there’s a way to fix it.

On our server I have to run certain commands as an admin user. But I can’t just switch users with ‘su superuser’. I have to execute su with sudo. So, ‘sudo su superuser’.

If I do:

ansible all -a “whoami” -R superuser

Then the command hangs, as the server is asking for a password, which I do not have.

And if I do:

ansible all -a “whoami” -s -R superuser

I get the error message about trying to combine sudo and su.

Do I have options?

Thanks,

Ian

2

There aren’t any options for sudo + su together.

Are you sure you can’t just and skip the su’ing?

3

Can not. This a battle that has come up before.

Although it’s a very different tool, I know that Capistrano I can override how it calls certain shell commands. Is such a thing possible in Ansible? If so, I could just turn all use of “su” into “sudo su”

4

Replacing the name of the command is not presently possible – Sudo flags (those sent to sudo) are controllable, however.