Ping module false positives?

Get Help
1

Hello everyone

I am working with a small lab environment consisting of two virtual Cisco devices, a switch and a router. Both are pingable and reachable via ssh and my inventory file is shown below. I have a dummy entry in my inventory file pointing to a non-existent ip address. When I try to do a basic comm check with the Ansible ping module, I get a positive result from all three hosts listed in my inventory file, even the one that doesn’t exist.
According to the documentation, the Ansible ping module attempts to connect to each host and verify the python environment. So what is going on here?
inventory file:

  hw_lab1:
    hosts:
      sw1:
        ansible_host: 192.168.101.60
      rt1:
        ansible_host: 192.168.101.61
      dummy:
        ansible_host: 192.168.101.62
    vars:
      ansible_connection: ansible.netcommon.network_cli
      ansible_become: yes
      ansible_become_method: enable
      ansible_network_os: cisco.ios.ios
      ansible_user: zzz
      ansible_password: xxx

command and result:

$ ansible -i inventory.yml all -m ping
dummy | SUCCESS => {
    "changed": false,
    "ping": "pong"
}
rt1 | SUCCESS => {
    "changed": false,
    "ping": "pong"
}
sw1 | SUCCESS => {
    "changed": false,
    "ping": "pong"
}
2

The ping module does not ping a remote host. It only makes sure that the Ansible connection configured works, which in case of network modules is usually to locahost (because the network modules run on localhost). The module you’re looking for is ansible.netcommon.net_ping.

3

(Also for code blocks you need three backticks; a single backtick will only format things that go into one line.)

4

thx - i fixed the formatting.
I’m trying to confirm that my Ansible environment can connect to my hosts. Is there a module that works for network devices?

5

Yes, there is, it’s called ansible.netcommon.net_ping:

6

According to the docs page, ansible.netcommon.net_ping “Tests reachability using ping from network device to a remote destination.”, which is not what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to confirm that Ansible can connect to my hosts, confirming routing & authentication. The ansible.builtin.ping module says “Try to connect to host, verify a usable python and return pong on success” sounded exactly what I wanted, except you said that would only connect to the local environment, therefore not being useful to confirm routing & authentication.

7

Ah sorry, then I misunderstood you. Ansible itself connects to the host where the modules run, which is localhost in your case, so testing that isn’t very useful. What you want is to make sure that the network modules you are using can talk to the network device you want them to talk to. For that you need a module specific to your network devices.

Since you are apparently using the cisco.ios collection, I’d look in its documentation if you can find a module that can be used for that. I’d look for _info modules, though in case cisco.ios has resource modules instead of classic Ansible modules you’d have to use one of them to query information.

8

Thanks - will look into that