Tag: redhat

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Running Ansible playbooks against RHEL 8 servers

I’m experimenting with some Ansible playbooks against local VMs, in particular, for some reason a RHEL 8 VM, and getting some unitelligible errors:

File \"<frozen importlib._bootstrap_external>\", line 1112, in _legacy_get_spec\r\n  File \"<frozen importlib._bootstrap>\", line 441, in spec_from_loader\r\n  File \"<frozen importlib._bootstrap_external>\", line 544, in spec_from_file_location\r\n  File \"/tmp/ansible_ansible.legacy.setup_payload_z3bjr2pn/ansible_ansible.legacy.setup_payload.zip/ansible/module_utils/basic.py\", line 5\r\nSyntaxError: future feature annotations is not defined\r\n", "msg": "MODULE FAILURE: No start of json char found\nSee stdout/stderr for the exact error", "rc": 1}}, "msg": "The following modules failed to execute: ansible.legacy.setup\n"}

Googling for various parts of this error, I think the key error is:

SyntaxError: future feature annotations is not defined

… as this shows up in a few posts, and in particular this excellent post by Jeff Geerling that explains exactly what is going on with Python version incompatibilities between later versions of Ansible and RHEL 8 (which uses an older version of Python, 3.7)

Ansible version on my Mac:

❯ ansible-playbook --version
ansible-playbook [core 2.18.6]

Downgrading to Ansible 9x with brew:

❯ brew install ansible@9
==> Fetching downloads for: ansible@9
Warning: ansible@9 has been deprecated because it is not maintained upstream! It will be disabled on 2025-11-30

For personal projects this is not much of a big deal, and I don’t think I’m particularly taking advantage of any newer Ansible features, but bit of a version dependency nightmare.

Now I get:

❯ ansible --version
ansible [core 2.16.14]

… and can successfully apply playbooks against my RHEL 8 VM.

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Getting past Vagrant’s “Authentication failure” error when starting up OpenShift Origin

For getting up and running quickly with OpenShift Origin, RedHat have an all-in-one VM image you can provision with Vagrant. The instructions mention to not use Vagrant 1.8.5 as there’s an issue with the SSH setup – since I already had 1.8.5 installed for some other projects, I tried anyway, and ran into issues with SSH’ing into the VM with SSH keys.

When provisioning the VM, you’ll see:

 

Kevins-MacBook-Pro:openshift-origin kev$ vagrant up
Bringing machine 'default' up with 'virtualbox' provider...
==> default: Checking if box 'openshift/origin-all-in-one' is up to date...
==> default: Resuming suspended VM...
==> default: Booting VM...
==> default: Waiting for machine to boot. This may take a few minutes...
    default: SSH address: 127.0.0.1:2222
    default: SSH username: vagrant
    default: SSH auth method: private key
    default: Warning: Authentication failure. Retrying...
    default: Warning: Authentication failure. Retrying...

There’s a number of posts discussing this issue and a few workarounds, for example, here and here.

The suggestions relate to switching from the ssh authentication to userid/password, by adding this to your Vagrantfile:

config.ssh.username = "vagrant"
config.ssh.password = "vagrant"

I tried this, and when running vagrant up I had different errors about “SSH authentication failed”. Next I tried adding this recommendation:

 

config.ssh.insert_key = false

This didn’t make any difference initially, but doing a vagrant destroy, and then trying to bring it up again initially ran into the same issue, I Ctrl-C’d out and tried again and then it worked second time. I’m not sure what steps got past the ssh keys issue, but at this point I was up and running. There’s a long discussion in both the linked threads above that describe the cause of the issue, so if you’re interested take a look through those threads.

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