Ssh – Issues with ssh and Ansible

ansiblessh

When running an ansible task (with a script action), I'm getting this error message:

stderr: OpenSSH_6.0p1 Debian-4+deb7u2, OpenSSL 1.0.1e 11 Feb 2013
debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh/ssh_config
debug1: /etc/ssh/ssh_config line 19: Applying options for *
debug1: auto-mux: Trying existing master
debug1: mux_client_request_session: master session id: 2
Shared connection to 10.0.2.222 closed.

Now, there are a bunch of tasks targeting the same host before this one, and they all work fine.I know it's the client, because the client is Debian; the thing being provisioned is Centos.

When I tried to look up this error message, I discovered (to my chagrin) that what I got is usually the first part of some longer message for some other problem. I tried adding

Host 10.0.2.222
  ControlMaster no

to the beginning of my /etc/ssh/ssh_config because of this question out of pure desperation, but it didn't work and I genuinely don't know what could have gone wrong; I don't know enough about how SSH works to even figure out what the most likely culprit would be.

Best Answer

This fixed the problem mentioned in the question (problems still exist with the ssh connection, but that's for another question).

By default, ansible adds some options which override ssh_config options. Specifically, it adds:

-o ControlMaster=auto -o ControlPersist=60s -o ControlPath="/home/devel/.ansible/cp/ansible-ssh-%h-%p-%r"

Figured that out by using -vvv with ansible-playbook.

You can fix / override those options by specifying ssh_args in the [ssh_connection] section of your .ansible.cfg as specified here. Also worth noting is that, counter to what you might infer from the name, changing ssh_args doesn't actually change all of the args. Ansible also passes -C -tt -v -o KbdInteractiveAuthentication=no -o PreferredAuthentications=gssapi-with-mic,gssapi-keyex,hostbased,publickey -o ConnectTimeout=10 and other options (e.g. -o PasswordAuthentication=no -o User=root), some of which are simply immutable defaults, and some of which depend on variables you've specified in the playbook.

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