User module hanging on ansible playbooks

Strangely, our user module has begun to hang on creation of new user. We’ve never experienced this before and in most cases, multiple users are using the same ansible repo and some users run into the hang while others do not. And in the users that do see the issue, it seemingly comes and goes. Each user has the same version of libcloud, ansible (1.9.2) and building in GCE. The hang can last for over 15mins and in most cases we kill the playbook before it completes. The module has sudo access, but it still does not seem to complete. We’ve seen this across multiple flavors of linux (debian-7, centos-7) and we can’t seem to track down the root cause of the issue. I have even gone so far to replace the user core module with one from the repo.

Snippet:

  • name: add redis user
    sudo: yes
    user:
    name: “{{ redis_user }}”
    comment: “Redis”
    home: “{{ redis_install_dir }}”
    shell: “/bin/false”
    system: yes
    state: present

I’ve even paired down what the module does and still does not complete even with a simple create. I’ve run the user create locally as well, and it completes correctly but it does take much longer than it has in the past. I don’t believe this to be a timeout issue as its consistent on each run and there are many steps before this part of the playbook runs.

Anyone have ideas around getting to root cause?