Public Image around Ansible + Windows

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I posted up how to resolve the workaround on Twitter & my blog for the StackOverflows and Out of Memory issues I was facing with Windows + Ansible.

It was a tip from Chris Church, pointing me to this topic: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/8345#issuecomment-52074837

Applying that KB to the environments cleaned them up immediately, so my thought was to share that with the world; I doubt anyone else had encountered it yet, but I’m trying to build some buzz around Ansible + Windows; I’d love to see this take off as it’s better than anything else I’ve seen so far.

Blogs go stale quickly, and yet some of the ones that have influenced me the most are from when people are learning to use a tool and working through the gotchas. And what my worry is, I’m trying to get people excited about using this; I don’t want someone to pick it up, start going with it, hit the SO’s & memory dumps, and then give up on the tool, when I know that’s an issue on the Windows side only and I know there’s an environment fix for it.

But, to Michael’s point, posting up bugs and workarounds may not be the best thing for the image of Ansible. Also, it’s better to fix the problem than to work around it, and it seems that things move fairly quickly with the Windows development, so it may be better to try to quickly get something like that into the mainline of the devel branch.

The Windows side is only 2 months old so I expect that there’s going to be bugs and snags; I don’t want to tarnish the brand, I’m having a blast playing with Ansible and Windows and am just trying to get some excitement going around it.

Michael also pointed out there’s not a great medium for discussing it yet, so I’m starting this mail topic here to get that started. One other alternative is to set up a channel in Slack. It’s probably not always going to be free, but it’s free right now and its easy to use. I would be surprised too if they didn’t remain free for open source projects. Thoughts on that?

Anyway, start throwing the tomatoes at me, and lets discuss what we should be pushing outside of the community and what we should keep for internal discussions.

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Thanks for posting Damon.

Ultimately, as mentioned on twitter, I think the best thing to do here is to add a pull request to the Windows docs to make sure that if you are running that particular OS combo, you may wish to apply this particular hotfix.

Then, ideally, it would be nice if you could remove the blog post, as it does imply Ansible’s Windows support is flakey, when the reality is that remoting seems to be flakey under that OS combo, and that’s likely to be stale as soon as that hotfix gets applied to standard updates.

The other thing you link to seems to be about Kerberos, so that’s not quite related.

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https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/8914

Hi

I agree pull requests are the best medicine for any gremlins that you encounter and making software better.

Kerberos is actually important to many windows shops, although they may not know it. It is in fact the tech used to implement domain or active directory users although its not something that ms have been shouting about, at least when I was listening :-).

Since support for domain users is important for my current project I’ve just created PR https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/8914 to add support for it.

All the best,

Jon