I have the following problem. I use Ansible to run an installation script on remote servers, and the script reboots the server in the end. As a result, the task ends with "Failed to connect to the host via ssh: Connection closed" failure. I use ignore_unreachable: true to prevent the task from failing, but my main problem is that I would like to be able to see stdout of the task. For some reason, both stderr and stdout don't seem to be present for tasks that ended with connection closed by the server.
To make things worse, the install script runs as a non-privileged user, but at some point asks for sudo password, and for various reasons I can't use NOPASSWD option in sudoers config for this user. To work adound this, I eventually decided to use expect module to run the script:
- name: Launch installer script
expect:
command: "./install.sh"
chdir: "{{ installer_directory }}"
creates: "{{ product_base_directory }}/uninstall.sh"
responses: "{{ sudo_password_prompt | items2dict}}"
timeout: 1200 # 20 minutes
ignore_errors: true
ignore_unreachable: true
register: install_script_output
- name: "Display installer script output"
debug:
msg:
stdout: "{{ install_script_output.stdout_lines | default([]) }}"
stderr: "{{ install_script_output.stderr_lines | default([]) }}"
failed_when: "{{ not install_script_output.msg.startswith('Failed to connect') }}"
If the install script fails, the next task is perfectly able to access stdout_lines and stderr_lines fields of the registered variable. However, if the script succeeds and the remote server goes offline, the variable contains nothing but two fields: failed and msg.
{
"failed": true,
"msg": "Failed to connect to the host via ssh: System is going down. Unprivileged users are not permitted to log in anymore. For technical details, see pam_nologin(8).\n\nConnection closed by 10.10.10.10 port 22"
}
Is there a way to view stdout of such tasks that result in closing the connection with the remote host?
